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PLAYBOY  INTERVIEW:    1  llVlvJ  1  iT  I       I  JL/\Ia  1 

a  candid  conversation  with  the  controversial  ex-harvard  professor,  prime  partisan  and  prophet  of  LSD 


On  a  sunny  Saturday  afternoon  in 
1960,  beside  the  swimming  pool  of  his 
rented  summer  villa  in  Cuernavaca,  a 
39-year-old  American  ate  a  handful  of 
odd-looking  mushrooms  he'd  bought 
from  the  witch  doctor  of  a  nearby  vil- 
lage. Within  minutes,  he  recalled  later, 
he  felt  himself  "being  swept  over  the 
edge  of  a  sensory  niagara  into  a  mael- 
strom of  transcendental  visions  and  hal- 
lucinations. The  next  five  hours  could 
be  described  in  many-  extravagant  meta- 
phors, but  it  was  above  all  and  without 
question  the  deepest  religious  experi- 
ence of  my  life."  The  implications  of 
that  fateful  first  communion  are  as  yet 
unmeasured;  that  they  are  both  far- 
reaching  and  profound,  however,  is 
generally  conceded — for  the  fungi 
were  the  legendary  "sacred  mushrooms" 
that  have  since  become  known,  and 
feared  by  many,  as  one  of  the  psyche- 
delic (literally,  mind-manifesting)  chem- 
icals that  have  created  a  national  fad 
among  the  nation's  young  and  a  scandal 
in  the  press.  The  American  was  a  Har- 
vard psychotherapist  named  Timothy 
Leary,  who  has  since  found  himself  trans- 
mogrified from  scientist  and  researcher 
into  progenitor  and  high  priest  of  a  rev- 
olutionary movement  spawned  not  by  an 
idea  but  by  a  substance  that's  been  called 
"the  spiritual  equivalent  of  the  hydrogen 
bomb." 

Few  men,  in  their  youth,  would  have 
seemed  less  likely  to  emerge  as  a  reli- 
gious leader,  let  alone  as  a  rebel  with  a 
cause.  At  the  age  of  19,  Leary  distressed 


his  Roman  Catholic  mother  by  abandon- 
ing Holy  Cross  two  years  before  gradua- 
tion ("The  scholastic  approach  to  reli- 
gion didn't  turn  me  on"),  then  affronted 
his  father,  a  retired  Army  career  officer, 
by  walking  out  of  West  Point  after  18 
months  ("My  interests  were  philosophic 
rather  than  militaristic").  Not  until  he 
transferred  to  the  University  of  Alabama 
did  he  begin  to  settle  down  academically 
— to  work  for  his  B.  A.  in  psychology.  On 
graduation  in  1942,  he  enlisted  as  an 
Army  psychologist,  served  in  a  Pennsyl- 
vania hospital  until  the  end  of  the  War, 
then  resumed  his  schooling  and  earned 
his  Ph.  D.  at  the  University  of  California 
at  Berkeley.  Acquiring  both  eminence 
and  enemies  with  his  first  major  jobs — as 
director  of  Oakland's  progressive  Kaiser 
Foundation  Hospital  and  as  an  assistant 
professor  at  UC's  School  of  Medicine  in 
San  Francisco — Leary  began  to  display 
the  courage  and  sometimes  rash  icono- 
clasm  that  have  since  marked  every  phase 
of  his  checkered  career.  Contending  that 
traditional  psychiatric  methods  were 
hurling  as  many  patients  as  they  helped, 
he  resigned  in  1958  and  signed  up  as  a 
lecturer  on  clinical  psychology  at  Har- 
vard. There  he  began  to  evolve  and 
enunciate  the  theory  of  social  interplay 
and  personal  behavior  as  so  many  stylized 
games,  since  popularized  by  Dr.  Eric 
Berne  in  his  best-selling  book  "Games 
People  Play,"  and  to  both  preach  and 
practice  the  effective  but  unconventional 
new  psychiatric  research  technique  of 
sending  his  students  to  study  emotional 


problems  such  as  alcoholism  where  they 
germinate — rather  than  in  the  textbook 
or  the  laboratory. 

At  the  time,  predictably  enough,  few 
of  these  novel  notions  went  over  very 
well  with  Leary' s  hidebound  col- 
leagues. But  their  rumblings  of  skepti- 
cism rose  to  a  chorus  of  outrage  when 
Leary  returned  to  Harvard  in  1960  from 
his  pioneering  voyage  into  inner  space — 
beside  the  swimming  pool  in  Cuernava- 
ca— to  begin  experimenting  on  himself, 
his  associates  and  hundreds  of  volunteer 
subjects  with  measured  doses  of  psilo- 
cybin,  the  chemical  derivative  of  the 
sacred  mushrooms.  Vowing  "to  dedicate 
the  rest  of  my  life  as  a  psychologist  to 
the  systematic  exploration  of  this  new 
instrument,"  he  and  his  rapidly  multi- 
plying followers  began  to  turn  on 
with  the  other  psychedelics:  morning- 
glory  seeds,  nutmeg,  marijuana,  peyote, 
mescaline — and  a  colorless,  odorless, 
tasteless  but  incredibly  potent  labora- 
tory compound  called  LSD  23,  first  syn- 
thesized in  1938  by  a  Swiss  biochemist 
seeking  a  pain  killer  for  migraine  head- 
aches. A  hundred  times  stronger  than 
psilocybin,  LSD  sent  its  hallucinated 
users  on  multihued,  multileveled  roller- 
coaster  rides  so  spectacular  that  it  soon 
became  Leary 's  primary  tool  for  research. 
And  as  ivord  began  to  circulate  about  the 
fantastic,  phantasmagorical  "trips"  taken 
by  his  students,  it  soon  became  a  clan- 
destine campus  kick,  and  by  1962  had 
become  an  underground  cult  among  the 


"In  3000  people  that  I  have  personally 
observed  taking  LSD,  we've  had  only  four 
cases  of  prolonged  psychoses — two  or 
three  weeks  after  the  session.  All  of  these 
had  been  in  a  mental  hospital  before." 


"An  enormous  amount  of  energy  from 
every  fiber  of  your  body  is  released  under 
LSD — especially  sexual  energy.  There  is 
no  question  that  LSD  is  the  most  power- 
ful aphrodisiac  ever  discovered  by  man." 


"I  think  that  anyone  who  wants  to  have 
a  psychedelic  experience  and  is  willing 
to  prepare  for  it  and  to  examine  his  own 
hang-ups  and  neurotic  tendencies  should 
be    allowed    to    have    a    crack    at    it." 


young  avant-garde  from  London  to  Los 
Angeles. 

By  1963,  it  had  also  become  something 
of  an  embarrassment  to  Harvard,  how- 
ever,which  "regretfully"  dismissed  Leary, 
and  his  colleague  Dr.  Richard  Alpert,  in 
order  to  stem  the  rising  tide  of  avid  un- 
dergraduate interest  in  the  drug.  Un- 
daunted, they  organized  a  privately 
financed  research  group  called  the  Inter- 
national Foundation  for  Internal  Free- 
dom (IFIF),  and  set  up  a  psychedelic 
study  center  in  Zihuatanejo,  Mexico;  but 
before  they  could  resume  full-scale  LSD 
sessions,  the  Mexican  government 
stepped  in,  anticipating  adverse  popular 
reaction,  and  demanded  that  they  leave 
the  country. 

Leary  had  now  become  not  only  the 
messiah  but  the  martyr  of  the  psychedelic 
movement.  But  soon  afterward  came  a 
dramatic  lllh-hour  reprieve  from  a  young 
New   York   millionaire   named    William 
Hitchcock,  a  veteran  LSD  voyager  who 
believed   in   the   importance   of  Leary's 
xvork — by   now   a   mission — and   toward 
that  end  turned  over  to  him  a  rambling 
mansion  on  his  4000-acre  estate  in  Mill- 
brook,  New  York,  which  has  since  become 
not  only  Leary's  home  and  headquarters 
but  also  a  kind  of  shrine  and  sanctuary 
for  psychedelic  pilgrims  from  all  over  the 
world.  On  April  16  of  this  year,  it  also 
became  a  target  for  further  harassment 
by  what  Leary  calls  "the  forces  of  middle- 
aged,  middle-class  authority."  Late   that 
night,  a  squad  of  Duchess  County  police 
descended  on  the  place,  searched  it  from 
top  to  bottom,  found  a  minute  quantity 
of  marijuana,  and  arrested  four  people — 
including  Leary.  If  convicted,  he  could 
be  fined  heavily  and  sent  to  prison  for 
16  years.  Already  appealing  another  con- 
viction, Leary  had  been  arrested  in  La- 
redo the  previous  December  as  he  was 
about  to  enter  Mexico  for  a  vacation, 
when    Customs  officials  searched  his  car 
and  found  a  half  ounce  of  marijuana  in 
the  possession  of  his  18-year-old    daugh- 
ter. Despite  his  claim  that  the  drug  was 
for  scientific  and  sacramental  use  in  the 
furtherance  of  his  work  and  his  spiritual 
beliefs  (as  a  practicing  Hindu),  he  was 
fined  f 30, 000  and  sentenced  to  30  years 
in  prison  for  transporting  marijuana  and 
failing  to  pay  the  Federal  marijuana  tax. 
hi    the   months  since   then,   the   LSD 
controversy    has    continued    to    escalate 
along  with  Leary's  notoriety — spurred  by 
a  spate  of  headline  stories  about  psyche- 
delic  psychoses,    dire    warnings    of    "in- 
stant insanity"  from  police  and  public 
health   officials,  and  pious  editorials   in- 
veighing against  the  evils  of  the  drug.  In 
May  and  June,  two  Senate  subcommit- 
tees conducted  widely  publicized  public 
hearings  on  LSD;  and  three  states — Cali- 
fornia, Nevada  and  New  Jersey — enacted 
laws  prohibiting  its  illicit  use,  possession, 
distribution    or    manufacture.     With    a 
ringing  appeal  for  still  more  stringent 
legislation   on   a  Federal  level,  Ronald 


Reagan  even  dragged  the  issue  into  his 
successful  campaign  for  the  Republican 
gubernatorial  nomination  in  California. 
It  was  amid  this  mounting  outcry 
against  the  drug  that  playboy  asked  Dr. 
Leary  to  present  his  side  of  the  psyche- 
delic story — and  to  answer  a  few  per- 
tinent questions  about  its  putative 
promise  and  its  alleged  perils.  Consenting 
readily,  he  invited  us  to  visit  him  in  Mill- 
brook,  where  we  found  him  a  few  days 
later  reciting  Hindu  morning  prayers 
with  a  group  of  guests  in  the  kitchen  of 
the  64-room  mansion.  He  greeted  us 
warmly  and  led  the  way  to  a  third-floor 
library.  Instead  of  sitting  down  in  one  of 
the  room's  well-worn  easy  chairs,  he 
crossed  the  room,  stepped  out  of  an  open 
window  onto  a  tin  roof  over  a  second- 
floor  bay  window,  and  proceeded  to 
stretch  out  on  a  double-width  mattress  a 
few  feet  from  the  edge.  While  we  made 
ourself  comfortable  at  the  other  end  of 
the  mattress,  he  opened  his  shirt  to  the 
warm  summer  sun,  propped  his  bare  feet 
against  the  shingles,  looked  down  at  the 
mansion's  vast  rolling  meadow  of  a 
lawn,  listened  for  a  moment  to  the  song 
of  a  chickadee  in  the  branches  of  a  tree 
nearby,  and  then  turned,  ready  for  our 
first  question. 

PLAYBOY:  How  many  times  have  you  used 
LSD,  Dr.  Leary? 

LEARY:  Up  to  this  moment,  I've  had  311 
psychedelic  sessions. 

PLAYBOY:  What  do  you  think  it's  done  for 
you — and  to  you? 

LEARY:  That's  difficult  to  answer  easily. 
Let  me  say  this:  I  was  39  when  I  had  my 
first  psychedelic  experience.  At  that 
time,  I  was  a  middle-aged  man  involved 
in  the  middle-aged  process  of  dying.  My 
joy  in  life,  my  sensual  openness,  my  crea- 
tivity were  all  sliding  downhill.  Since 
that  time,  six  years  ago,  my  life  has  been 
renewed  in  almost  every  dimension. 
Most  of  my  colleagues  at  the  University 
of  California  and  at  Harvard,  of  course, 
feel  that  I've  become  an  eccentric  and  a 
kook.  I  would  estimate  that  fewer  than 
15  percent  of  my  professional  colleagues 
understand  and  support  what  I'm  doing. 
The  ones  who  do,  as  you  might  expect, 
tend  to  be  among  the  younger  psychol- 
ogists. If  you  know  a  person's  age,  you 
know  what  he's  going  to  think  and  feel 
about  LSD.  Psychedelic  drugs  are  the 
medium  of  the  young.  As  you  move  up 
the  age  scale — into  the  30s,  40s  and  50s — 
fewer  and  fewer  people  are  open  to  the 
possibilities  that  these  chemicals  offer. 
PLAYBOY:  Why  is  that? 
LEARY:  To  the  person  over  35  or  40,  the 
word  "drug"  means  one  of  two  things: 
doctor-disease  or  dope  fiend-crime. 
Nothing  you  can  say  to  a  person  who 
has  this  neurological  fix  on  the  word 
"drug"  is  going  to  change  his  mind.  He's 
frozen  like  a  Pavlovian  dog  to  this  con- 
ditioned reflex.  To  people  under  25,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  word  "drug"  refers  to 


a  wide  range  of  mind  benders  running 
from  alcohol,  energizers  and  stupefiers  to 
marijuana  and  the  other  psychedelic 
drugs.  To  middle-aged  America,  it  may 
be  synonymous  with  instant  insanity, 
but  to  most  Americans  under  25,  the 
psychedelic  drug  means  ecstasy,  sensual 
unfolding,  religious  experience,  revela- 
tion, illumination,  contact  with  nature. 
There's  not  a  teenager  or  young  person 
in  the  United  States  today  who  doesn't 
know  at  least  one  person  who  has  had  a 
good  experience  with  marijuana  or  LSD. 
The  horizons  of  the  current  younger 
generation,  in  terms  of  expanded  con- 
sciousness, are  light-years  beyond  those 
of  their  parents.  The  breakthrough  has 
occurred;  there's  no  going  back.  The 
psychedelic  battle  is  won. 
PLAYBOY:  Why,  then,  have  you  called  for 
a  one-year  "cease-fire"  on  the  use  of  LSD 
and  marijuana? 

LEARY:    Because    there    have    never    been 
two  generations  of  human  beings  so  far 
apart — living  essentially  in  two  different 
worlds,  speaking  two  different  languages 
— as  the  people  under  25  and  the  older 
generation.  Evolutionary  misunderstand- 
ing causes  bloodshed  and  imprisonment. 
To  relieve  this  situation,  I've  asked  the 
younger  generation  to  cool  it  for  a  year 
and  to  use  this  moratorium  period  to  ex- 
plain to  their  parents — and  to  their  jail- 
ers— what  LSD  and  marijuana  are,  and 
why  we  want  and  intend  to  use  them.  I 
have  made  clear  that  this  is  a  voluntary 
waiving  of   the   constitutional   right    to 
change  your  own   consciousness.   But   I 
suggested  this  as  a  conciliatory  gesture  to 
mollify  and  educate  the  older  generation 
and  to  allow  time  for  the  younger  people 
to   learn   more   about   how   to  turn  on. 
I'm  demanding  that  this  period  also  be  a 
moratorium  on  hysterical  legislation  and 
on  punitive  arrests  of  young  people  for 
the  possession  of  LSD  and  marijuana.  If, 
at  the  end  of  one  year,  the  older  genera- 
tion  has   not    taken    advantage   of    this 
cease-fire,  I   predict  and  indeed   urge  a 
firm  statement  on  the  part  of  everyone 
involved  that  they  intend  to  resume  the 
use  of  psychedelics,  to  exercise  their  con- 
stitutional  right    to   expand    their   own 
consciousness — whatever  the  cost. 
PLAYBOY:  What  do  you  say  to  the  stand- 
ard charge  that  LSD  is  too  powerful  and 
dangerous  to  entrust  to  the  young? 
LEARY:  Well,  none  of  us  yet  knows  exact- 
ly how  LSD  can  be  used  for  the  growth 
and  benefit  of  the  human  being.  It  is  a 
powerful  releaser  of  energy  as  yet  not 
fully  understood.  But  if  I'm  confronted 
with  the  possibility  that  a  15-year-old  or 
a  50-year-old  is  going  to  use  a  new  form 
of  energy  that  he  doesn't  understand,  I'll 
back   the    15-yearold  every   time.   Why? 
Because  a   15-year-old  is  going  to  use  a 
new    form   of   energy    to    have    fun,    to 
intensify   sensation,    to   make   love,    for 
curiosity,  for  personal  growth.  Many  50- 
year-olds  have  lost  their  curiosity,*  have 
lost    their   ability   to   make   love,   have 


dulled  their  openness  to  new  sensations, 
and  would  use  any  form  of  new  energy 
for  power,  control  and  warfare.  So  it 
doesn't  concern  me  at  all  that  young 
people  are  taking  time  out  from  the 
educational  and  occupational  assembly 
lines  to  experiment  with  consciousness, 
to  dabble  with  new  forms  of  experience 
and  artistic  expression.  The  present  gen- 
eration under  the  age  of  25  is  the  wisest 
and  holiest  generation  that  the  human 
race  has  ever  seen.  And,  by  God,  instead 
of  lamenting,  derogating  and  imprison- 
ing them,  we  should  support  them,  listen 
to  them  and  turn  on  with  them. 
PLAYBOY:  If  we  wanted  to  take  you  up  on 
that  last  suggestion,  how  would  we  go 
about  it? 

IEARY:  Find  a  beloved  friend  who  knows 
where  to  get  LSD  and  how  to  run  a  ses- 
sion; or  find  a  trusted  and  experienced 
LSD  voyager  to  guide  you  on  a  trip. 
PLAYBOY:  Is  it  necessary  to  have  a  guide? 
LEARY:  Yes.  Unless  you  have  an  experi- 
enced guide — at  least  for  your  first  10 
or  15  sessions — it  would  be  extremely 
reckless. 

PLAYBOY:  What  if  a  person  can't  find  ei- 
ther a  guide  or  a  source  of  LSD  among 
his  friends?  Where  does  he  go? 
LEARY:  LSD  is  against  the  law,  and  I  cer- 
tainly would  not  advise  anyone  to  vio- 
late the  law.  I  will  say  this,  however: 
Throughout  human  history,  men  who 
have  wanted  to  expand  their  conscious- 
ness, to  find  deeper  meaning  inside 
themselves,  have  been  able  to  do  it  if 
they  were  willing  to  commit  the  time 
and  energy  to  do  so.  In  other  times  and 
countries,  men  would  walk  barefooted 
2000  miles  to  find  spiritual  teachers  who 
would  turn  them  on  to  Buddha,  Mo- 
hammed or  Ramakrishna. 
PLAYBOY:  If  you  can't  say  where  one  could 
buy  LSD,  can  you  tell  us  the  formula  for 
making  it?  We  understand  it  can  be  syn- 
thesized in  any  well-equipped  chemical 
laboratory. 

LEARY:  That's  true.  But  it  would  be  irre- 
sponsible of  me  to  reveal  it.  The  un- 
authorized manufacture  of  LSD  is  now 
against  the  law. 

PLAYBOY:  Assuming  you  can  get  it,  how 
do  you  take  it?  Can  it  be  injected,  or  is 
it  mostly  just  swallowed  in  a  sugar  cube? 
LEARY:  It  can  be  injected  or  it  can  come 
in  the  form  of  powder  or  pills  or  in  a 
solution,  which  is  odorless,  tasteless 
and  colorless.  In  any  case,  you're  deal- 
ing with  a  very  minute  quantity.  One 
hundred  micrograms  is  a  moderate  dose. 
PLAYBOY:  For  a  session  lasting  how  long? 
LEARY:  Eight  to  twelve  hours. 
PLAYBOY:  What's  it  like?  What  happens  to 
you? 

LEARY:  If  we're  speaking  in  a  general 
way,  what  happens  to  everyone  is  the  ex- 
perience of  incredible  acceleration  and 
intensification  of  all  senses  and  of  all 
mental  processes — which  can  be  very  con- 
fusing if  you're  not  prepared  for  it. 
Around  a   thousand  million  signals  fire 


off  in  your  brain  every  second;  during 
any  second  in  an  LSD  session,  you  find 
yourself  tuned  in  on  thousands  of  these 
messages  that  ordinarily  you  don't  regis- 
ter consciously.  And  you  may  be  getting 
an  incredible  number  of  simultaneous 
messages  from  different  parts  of  your 
body.  Since  you're  not  used  to  this,  it 
can  lead  to  incredible  ecstasy  or  it  can 
lead  to  confusion.  Some  people  are 
freaked  by  this  niagara  of  sensory  input. 
Instead  of  having  just  one  or  two  or 
three  things  happening  in  tidy  sequence, 
you're  suddenly  flooded  by  hundreds  of 
lights  and  colors  and  sensations  and 
images,  and  you  can  get  quite  lost. 

You  sense  a  strange,  powerful  force 
beginning  to  unloose  and  radiate 
through  your  body.  In  normal  percep- 
tion, we  are  aware  of  static  symbols.  But 
as  the  LSD  effect  takes  hold,  everything 
begins  to  move,  and  this  relentless,  im- 
personal, slowly  swelling  movement  will 
continue  through  the  several  hours  of 
the  session.  It's  as  though  for  all  of  your 
normal  waking  life  you  have  been 
caught  in  a  still  photograph,  in  an  awk- 
ward, stereotyped  posture;  suddenly  the 
show  comes  alive,  balloons  out  to  several 
dimensions  and  becomes  irradiated  with 
color  and  energy. 

The  first  thing  you  notice  is  an  incred- 
ible enhancement  of  sensory  awareness. 
Take  the  sense  of  sight.  LSD  vision  is 
to  normal  vision  as  normal  vision  is  to 
the  picture  on  a  badly  tuned  television 
set.  Under  LSD,  it's  as  though  you 
have  microscopes  up  to  your  eyes,  in 
which  you  see  jewellike,  radiant  details 
of  anything  your  eye  falls  upon.  You 
are  really  seeing  for  the  first  time — not 
static,  symbolic  perception  of  learned 
things,  but  patterns  of  light  bouncing 
off  the  objects  around  you  and  hurtling 
at  the  speed  of  light  into  the  mosaic  of 
rods  and  cones  in  the  retina  of  your  eye. 
Everything  seems  alive.  Everything  is 
alive,  beaming  diamond-bright  light 
waves  into  your  retina. 
PLAYBOY:  Is  the  sense  of  hearing  similarly 
intensified? 

LEARY:  Tremendously.  Ordinarily  we  hear 
just  isolated  sounds:  the  rings  of  a  tele- 
phone, die  sound  of  somebody's  words. 
But  when  you  turn  on  with  LSD,  the 
organ  of  Corti  in  your  inner  ear  be- 
comes a  trembling  membrane  seething 
with  tattoos  of  sound  waves.  The  vibra- 
tions seem  to  penetrate  deep  inside  you, 
swell  and  burst  there.  You  hear  one  note 
of  a  Bach  sonata,  and  it  hangs  there, 
glittering,  pulsating,  for  an  endless 
length  of  time,  while  you  slowly  orbit 
around  it.  Then,  hundreds  of  years  later, 
comes  the  second  note  of  the  sonata,  and 
again,  for  hundreds  of  years,  you  slowly 
drift  around  the  two  notes,  observing 
the  harmony  and  the  discords,  and 
reflecting  on  the  history  of  music. 

But  when  your  nervous  system  is 
turned  on  with  LSD,  and  all  the  wires 
are  flashing,  the  senses  begin  to  overlap 


and  merge.  You  not  only  hear  but  see 
the  music  emerging  from  the  speaker  sys- 
tem— like  dancing  particles,  like  squirm- 
ing curls  of  toothpaste.  You  actually  see 
the  sound,  in  multicolored  patterns, 
while  you're  hearing  it.  At  the  same 
time,  you  are  the  sound,  you  are  the 
note,  you  are  the  string  of  the  violin  or 
the  piano.  And  every  one  of  your  organs 
is  pulsating  and  having  orgasms  in 
rhythm  with  it. 

PLAYBOY:  What  happens  to  the  sense  of 
taste? 

LEARY:  Taste  is  intensified,  too,  although 
normally  you  won't  feel  like  eating  dur- 
ing an  LSD  session,  any  more  than  you 
feel  like  eating  when  you  take  your  first 
solo  at  the  controls  of  a  supersonic  jet. 
Although  if  you  eat  after  a  session,  there 
is  an  appreciation  of  all  the  particular 
qualities  of  food — its  texture  and  resil- 
iency and  viscosity — such  as  we  are 
not  conscious  of  in  a  normal  state  of 
awareness. 

PLAYBOY:  How  about  the  sense  of  smell? 
LEARY:  This  is  one  of  the  most  over- 
whelming aspects  of  an  LSD  experience. 
It  seems  as  though  for  the  first  time  you 
are  breathing  life,  and  you  remember 
with  amusement  and  distaste  that  plas- 
tic, odorless,  artificial  gas  that  you  used 
to  consider  air.  During  the  LSD  experi- 
ence, you  discover  that  you're  actually 
inhaling  an  atmosphere  composed  of 
millions  of  microscopic  strands  of  olfac- 
tory ticker  tape,  exploding  in  your  nos- 
trils with  ecstatic  meaning.  When  you  sit 
across  the  room  from  a  woman  during 
an  LSD  session,  you're  aware  of  thou- 
sands of  penetrating  chemical  messages 
floating  from  her  through  the  air  into 
your  sensory  center:  a  symphony  of  a 
thousand  odors  that  all  of  us  exude  at 
every  moment — the  shampoo  she  uses, 
her  cologne,  her  sweat,  the  exhaust  and 
discharge  from  her  digestive  system,  her 
sexual  perfume,  the  fragrance  of  her 
clothing — grenades  of  eroticism  explod- 
ing in  the  olfactory  cell. 
PLAYBOY:  Does  the  sense  of  touch  become 
equally  erotic? 

LEARY:  Touch  becomes  electric  as  well  as 
erotic.  I  remember  a  moment  during  one 
session  in  which  my  wife  leaned  over 
and  lightly  touched  the  palm  of  my 
hand  with  her  finger.  Immediately  a 
hundred  thousand  end  cells  in  my  hand 
exploded  in  soft  orgasm.  Ecstatic  ener- 
gies pulsated  up  my  arms  and  rocketed 
into  my  brain,  where  another  hundred 
thousand  cells  softly  exploded  in  pure, 
delicate  pleasure.  The  distance  between 
my  wife's  finger  and  the  palm  of  my 
hand  was  about  50  miles  of  space,  filled 
with  cotton  candy,  infiltrated  with  thou- 
sands of  silver  wires  hurtling  energy 
back  and  forth.  Wave  after  wave  of  ex- 
quisite energy  pulsed  from  her  finger. 
Wave  upon  wave  of  ethereal  tissue  rap- 
ture— delicate,  shuddering — coursed  back 
and  forth  from  her  finger  to  my  palm. 
PLAYBOY:  And  this  rapture  was  erotic? 


LEARY:  Transcendentally.  An  enormous 
amount  of  energy  from  every  fiber  of 
your  body  is  released  under  LSD — most 
especially  including  sexual  energy. 
There  is  no  question  that  LSD  is  the 
most  powerful  aphrodisiac  ever  discov- 
ered by  man. 

PIAYBOY:  Would  you  elaborate? 
LEARY:  I'm  saying  simply  that  sex  under 
LSD  becomes  miraculously  enhanced 
and  intensified.  I  don't  mean  that  it  sim- 
ply generates  genital  energy.  It  doesn't 
automatically  produce  a  longer  erection. 
Rather,  it  increases  your  sensitivity  a 
thousand  percent.  Let  me  put  it  this 
way:  Compared  with  sex  under  LSD,  the 
way  you've  been  making  love — no  matter 
how  ecstatic  the  pleasure  you  think  you 
get  from  it — is  like  making  love  to  a 
department-store-window  dummy.  In  sen- 
sory and  cellular  communion  on  LSD, 
you  may  spend  a  half  hour  making  love 
with  eyeballs,  another  half  hour  making 
love  with  breath.  As  you  spin  through  a 
thousand  sensory  and  cellular  organic 
changes,  she  does,  too.  Ordinarily,  sex- 
ual communication  involves  one's  own 
chemicals,  pressure  and  interactions  of  a 
very  localized  nature — in  what  the  psy- 
chologists call  the  erogenous  zones.  A 
vulgar,  dirty  concept,  I  think.  When 
you're  making  love  under  LSD,  it's  as 
though  every  cell  in  your  body — and  you 
have  trillions — is  making  love  with  every 
cell  in  her  body.  Your  hand  doesn't  ca- 
ress her  skin  but  sinks  down  into  and 
merges  with  ancient  dynamos  of  ecstasy 
within  her. 

PLAYBOY:  How  often  have  you  made  love 
under  the  influence  of  LSD? 
LEARY:  Every  time  I've  taken  it.  In  fact, 
that  is  what  the  LSD  experience  is  all 
about.  Merging,  yielding,  flowing,  un- 
ion, communion.  It's  all  lovemaking. 
You  make  love  with  candlelight,  with 
sound  waves  from  a  record  player,  with 
a  bowl  of  fruit  on  the  table,  with  the 
trees.  You're  in  pulsating  harmony  with 
all  the  energy  around  you. 
PLAYBOY:  Including  that  of  a  woman? 
LEARY:  The  three  inevitable  goals  of  the 
LSD  session  are  to  discover  and  make 
love  with  God,  to  discover  and  make 
love  with  yourself,  and  to  discover  and 
make  love  with  a  woman.  You  can't 
make  it  with  yourself  unless  you've  made 
it  with  the  timeless  energy  process 
around  you,  and  you  can't  make  it  with 
a  woman  until  you've  made  it  with  your- 
self. The  natural  and  obvious  way  to 
take  LSD  is  with  a  member  of  the  oppo- 
site sex,  and  an  LSD  session  that  does 
not  involve  an  ultimate  merging  with  a 
person  of  the  opposite  sex  isn't  really 
complete.  One  of  the  great  purposes  of  an 
LSD  session  is  sexual  union.  The  more 
expanded  your  consciousness — the  farther 
out  you  can  move  beyond  your  mind — 
the  deeper,  the  richer,  the  longer  and 
more  meaningful  your  sexual  communion. 


PLAYBOY:  We've  heard  about  sessions  in 
which  couples  make  love  for  hours  on 
end,  to  the  point  of  exhaustion,  but  never 
seem  to  reach  exhaustion.  Is  this  true? 
LEARY:  Inevitably. 

PLAYBOY:  Can  you  describe  the  sensation 
of  an  orgasm  under  LSD? 
LEARY:  Only  the  most  reckless  poet 
would  attempt  that.  I  have  to  say  to  you, 
"What  does  one  say  to  a  little  child?" 
The  child  says,  "Daddy,  what  is  sex 
like?"  and  you  try  to  describe  it,  and 
then  the  little  child  says,  "Well,  is  it  fun 
like  the  circus?"  and  you  say,  "Well,  not 
exactly  like  that."  And  the  child  says,  "Is 
it  fun  like  chocolate  ice  cream?"  and  you 
say,  "Well,  it's  like  that  but  much,  much 
more  than  that."  And  the  child  says,  "Is 
it  fun  like  the  roller  coaster,  then?"  and 
you  say,  "Well,  that's  part  of  it,  but  it's 
even  more  than  that."  In  short,  I  can't 
tell  you  what  it's  like,  because  it's  not 
like  anything  that's  ever  happened  to 
you — and  there  aren't  words  adequate  to 
describe  it,  anyway.  You  won't  know 
what  it's  like  until  you  try  it  yourself — 
and  then  I  won't  need  to  tell  you. 
PLAYBOY:  We've  heard  that  some  women 
who  ordinarily  have  difficulty  achieving 
orgasm  find  themselves  capable  of  multi- 
ple orgasms  under  LSD.  Is  that  true? 
LEARY:  In  a  carefully  prepared,  loving 
LSD  session,  a  woman  will  inevitably 
have  several  hundred  orgasms. 
PLAYBOY:  Several  hundred} 
LEARY:  Yes.  Several  hundred. 
PLAYBOY:  What  about  a  man? 
LEARY:  This  preoccupation  with  the  num- 
ber of  orgasms  is  a  hang-up  for  many  men 
and  women.  It's  as  crude  and  vulgar  a 
concept  as  wondering  how  much  she  paid 
for  the  negligee. 

PLAYBOY:  Still,  there  must  be  some  sort  of 
physiological  comparison.  If  a  woman 
can  have  several  hundred  orgasms,  how 
many  can  a  man  have  under  optimum 
conditions? 

LEARY:  It  would  depend  entirely  on  the 
amount  of  sexual — and  psychedelic— ex- 
perience the  man  has  had.  I  can  speak 
only  for  myself  and  about  my  own  expe- 
rience. I  can  only  compare  what  I  was 
with  what  I  am  now.  In  the  last  six 
years,  my  openness  to,  my  responsiveness 
to,  my  participation  in  every  form  of 
sensory  expression  has  multiplied  a 
thousandfold. 

PLAYBOY:  This  aspect  of  LSD  has  been 
hinted  at  privately  but  never  spelled  out 
in  public  until  now.  Why? 
LEARY:  The  sexual  impact  is,  of  course, 
the  open  but  private  secret  about  LSD, 
which  none  of  us  has  talked  about  in  the 
last  few  years.  It's  socially  dangerous 
enough  to  say  that  LSD  helps  you  find 
divinity  and  helps  you  discover  yourself. 
You're  already  in  trouble  when  you  say 
that.  But  then  if  you  announce  that  the 
psychedelic  experience  is  basically  a  sex- 
ual experience,  you're  asking  to  bring 
the  whole  middle-aged,  middle-class 
monolith  down   on   your  head.   At   the 


present  time,  however,  I'm  under  a  30- 
year  sentence  of  imprisonment,  which 
for  a  45-year-old  man  is  essentially  a  life 
term;  and  in  addition,  I  am  under  in- 
dictment on  a  second  marijuana  offense 
involving  a  16-year  sentence.  Since  there 
is  hardly  anything  more  that  -middle- 
aged,  middle-class  authority  can  do  to 
me — and  since  the  secret  is  out  anyway 
among  the  young — I  feel  I'm  free  at 
this  moment  to  say  what  we've  never 
said  before:  that  sexual  ecstasy  is  the 
basic  reason  for  the  current  LSD  boom. 
When  Dr.  Goddard,  the  head  of  the 
Food  and  Drug  Administration,  an- 
nounced in  a  Senate  hearing  that  ten 
percent  of  our  college  students  are 
taking  LSD,  did  you  ever  wonder  why? 
Sure,  they're  discovering  God  and 
meaning;  sure,  they're  discovering  them- 
selves; but  did  you  really  think  that  sex 
wasn't  the  fundamental  reason  for  this 
surging,  youthful  social  boom?  You  can 
no  more  do  research  on  LSD  and  leave 
out  sexual  ecstasy  than  you  can  do  mi- 
croscopic research  on  tissue  and  leave 
out  cells. 

LSD  is  not  an  automatic  trigger  to 
sexual  awakening,  however.  The  first  ten 
times  you  take  it,  you  might  not  be  able 
to  have  a  sexual  experience  at  all,  be- 
cause you're  so  overwhelmed  and  de- 
lighted— or  frightened  and  confused — 
by  the  novelty;  the  idea  of  having  sex 
might  be  irrelevant  or  incomprehen- 
sible at  the  moment.  But  it  depends 
upon  the  setting  and  the  partner.  It  is 
almost  inevitable,  if  a  man  and  his  mate 
take  LSD  together,  that  their  sexual  en- 
ergies will  be  unimaginably  intensified, 
and  unless  clumsiness  or  fright  on  the 
part  of  one  or  the  other  blocks  it,  it  will 
lead  to  a  deeper  experience  than  they 
ever  thought  possible. 

From  the  beginning  of  our  research,  I 
have  been  aware  of  this  tremendous  per- 
sonal power  in  LSD.  You  must  be  very 
careful  to  take  it  only  with  someone  you 
know  really  well,  because  it's  almost  in- 
evitable that  a  woman  will  fall  in  love 
with  the  man  who  shares  her  LSD  expe- 
rience. Deep  and  lasting  neurological 
imprints,  profound  emotional  bonds, 
can  develop  as  a  result  of  an  LSD  session 
— bonds  that  can  last  a  lifetime.  For  this 
reason,  I  have  always  been  extremely 
cautious  about  running  sessions  with 
men  and  women.  We  always  try  to  have 
a  subject's  husband  or  wife  present  dur- 
ing his  or  her  first  session,  so  that  as 
these  powerful  urges  develop,  they  are 
directed  in  ways  that  can  be  lived  out 
responsibly  after  the  session. 
PLAYBOY:  Are  you  preaching  psychedelic 
monogamy? 

LEARY:  Well,  I  can't  generalize,  but  one 
of  the  great  lessons  I've  learned  from 
LSD  is  that  every  man  contains  the  es- 
sence of  all  men  and  every  woman  has 
within  her  all  women.  I  remember  a  ses- 
sion a  few  years  ago  in  which,  with  hor- 
ror and  ecstasy,  I  opened  my  eyes  and 


looked  into  the  eyes  of  my  wife  and  was 
pulled  into  the  deep  blue  pools  of  her 
being  floating  softly  in  the  center  of 
her  mind,  experiencing  everything  that 
she  was  experiencing,  knowing  every 
thought  that  she  had  ever  had.  As  my 
eyes  were  riveted  to  hers,  her  face  began 
to  melt  and  change.  I  saw  her  as  a  young 
girl,  as  a  baby,  as  an  old  woman  with 
gray  hair  and  seamy,  wrinkled  face.  I 
saw  her  as  a  witch,  a  Madonna,  a  nag- 
ging crone,  a  radiant  queen,  a  Byzantine 
virgin,  a  tired,  worldly-wise  Oriental 
whore  who  had  seen  every  sight  of  life 
repeated  a  thousand  times.  She  was  all 
women,  all  woman,  the  essence  of  female 
— eyes  smiling,  quizzically,  resignedly, 
devilishly,  always  inviting:  "See  me,  hear 
me,  join  me,  merge  with  me,  keep  the 
dance  going."  Now,  the.  implications  of 
this  experience  for  sex  and  mating,  I 
think,  are  obvious.  It's  because  of  this, 
not  because  of  moral  restrictions  or  re- 
straints, that  I've  been  extremely  monog- 
amous in  my  use  of  LSD  over  the  last 
six  years. 

PLAYBOY:  When  you  speak  of  monogamy, 
do  you  mean  complete  sexual  fidelity  to 
one  woman? 

IEARY:  Well,  the  notion  of  running 
around  trying  to  find  different  mates  is  a 
very  low-level  concept.  We  are  living  in 
a  world  of  expanding  population  in 
which  there  are  more  and  more  beauti- 
ful young  girls  coming  off  the  assembly 
line  each  month.  It's  obvious  that  the 
sexual  criteria  of  the  past  are  going  to 
be  changed,  and  that  what's  demanded 
of  creatures  with  our  sensory  and  cellu- 
lar repertoire  is  not  just  one  affair  after 
another  with  one  young  body  after  an- 
other, but  the  exploration  of  the  incredi- 
ble depths  and  varieties  of  your  own 
identity  with  a  single  member  of  the  op- 
posite sex.  This  involves  time  and  com- 
mitment to  the  voyage. 
PLAYBOY:  Do  you  mean  to  imply  that 
you've  had  only  one  bed  partner  in  the 
last  six  years? 

LEAHY:  I've  had  more  than  one  long-term 
relationship  during  this  period.  But 
there  is  a  certain  kind  of  neurological 
and  cellular  fidelity  that  develops.  I  have 
said  for  many  years  now  that  in  the  fu- 
ture the  grounds  for  divorce  would  not 
be  that  your  wife  went  to  bed  with  an- 
other man  and  bounced  around  on  a 
mattress  for  an  hour  or  two,  but  that 
your  wife  had  an  LSD  session  with  some- 
body else,  because  the  bonds  and  the  con- 
nections that  develop  are  so  powerful. 
PLAYBOY:  It's  been  reported  that  when 
you  are  in  the  company  of  women,  quite 
a  lot  of  them  turn  on  to  you.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  a  friend  of  yours  told  us  that 
you  could  have  two  or  three  different 
women  every  night  if  you  wanted  to. 
Is  he  right? 

IEARY:  For  the  most  part,  during  the  last 
six  years,  I  have  lived  very  quietly  in  our 
research  centers.  But  on  lecture  tours  and 
in  highly  enthusiastic  social  gatherings, 


there  is  no  question  that  a  charismatic 
public    figure    does   generate    attraction 
and  stimulate  a  sexual  response. 
PLAYBOY:  How  often  do  you  return  diis 
response? 

LEARY:  Every  woman  has  built  into  her 
cells  and  tissues  the  longing  for  a  hero- 
sage-mythic  male  to  open  up  and  share 
her  own  divinity.  But  casual  sexual  en- 
counters do  not  satisfy  this  deep  longing. 
Any  charismatic  person  who  is  conscious 
of  his  own  mythic  potency  awakens  this 
basic  hunger  in  women  and  pays  rever- 
ence to  it  at  the  level  that  is  harmonious 
and  appropriate  at  the  time.  Compul- 
sive body  grabbing,  however,  is  rarely 
the  vehicle  of  such  communication. 
PLAYBOY:  Do  you  disapprove  of  the  idea 
of  casual  romance — catalyzed  by  LSD? 
LEARY:  Well,  I'm  no  one  to  tell  anyone 
else  what  to  do.  But  I  would  say,  if  you 
use  LSD  to  make  out  sexually  in  the 
seductive  sense,  then  you'll  be  a  very 
humiliated  and  embarrassed  person,  be- 
cause it's  just  not  going  to  work.  On 
LSD,  her  eyes  would  be  microscopic,  and 
she'd  see  very  plainly  what  you  were  up 
to,  coming  on  with  some  heavy-handed, 
mustache-twisting  routine.  You'd  look 
like  a  consummate  ass,  and  she'd  laugh 
at  you,  or  you'd  look  like  a  monster  and 
she'd  scream  and  go  into  a  paranoid 
state.  Nothing  good  can  happen  with 
LSD  if  it's  used  crudely  or  for  power  or 
manipulative  purposes. 
PLAYBOY:  Suppose  you  met  a  girl  at  a  par- 
ty, developed  an  immediate  rapport,  and 
you  both  decided  to  share  an  LSD  trip 
that  same  night.  Could  it  work  under 
those  circumstances? 
LEARY:  You  must  remember  that  in  tak- 
ing LSD  with  someone  else,  you  are 
voluntarily  relinquishing  all  of  your  per- 
sonality defenses  and  opening  yourself 
up  in  a  very  vulnerable  manner.  If  you 
and  the  girl  are  ready  to  do  this,  there 
would  be  an  immediate  and  deep  rap- 
port if  you  took  a  trip  together.  People 
from  the  LSD  cult  would  be  able  to  do 
it  upon  a  brief  meeting,  but  an  inexperi- 
enced person  would  probably  find  it  ex- 
tremely confusing,  and  the  people  might 
become  quite  isolated  from  each  other. 
They  might  be  whirled  into  the  rapture 
or  confusion  of  their  own  inner  work- 
ings and  forget  entirely  that  the  other 
person  is  there. 

PLAYBOY:  According  to  some  reports,  LSD 
can  trigger  the  acting  out  of  latent  ho- 
mosexual impulses  in  ostensibly  hetero- 
sexual men  and  women.  Is  there  any 
truth  to  that,  in  your  opinion? 
LEARY:  On  the  contrary,  the  fact  is  that 
LSD  is  a  specific  cure  for  homosexuality. 
It's  well  known  that  most  sexual  perver- 
sions are  the  result  not  of  biological 
binds  but  of  freaky,  dislocating  child- 
hood experiences  of  one  kind  or  anoth- 
er. Consequently,  it's  not  surprising  that 
we've  had  many  cases  of  long-term  homo- 
sexuals who,  under  LSD,  discover  that 
they  are  not  only  genitally  but  genet- 


ically male,  that  they  are  basically  at- 
tracted to  females.  The  most  famous 
and  public  of  such  cases  is  that  of  Allen 
Ginsberg,  who  has  openly  stated  that 
the  first  time  he  turned  on  to  women 
was  during  an  LSD  session  several  years 
ago.  Bui  this  is  only  one  of  many 
such  cases. 

PLAYBOY:  Has  this  happened  with  Les- 
bians? 

LEARY:  I  was  just  going  to  cite  such  a 
case.  An  extremely  attractive  girl  came 
down  to  our  training  center  in  Mexico. 
She  was  a  Lesbian  and  she  was  very  active 
sexually,  but  all  of  her  energy  was  devot- 
ed to  making  it  with  girls.  She  was  at  an 
LSD  session  at  one  of  our  cottages  and 
went  down  to  the  beach  and  saw  this 
young  man  in  a  bathing  suit  and- — flash! 
— for  the  first  time  in  her  life  the  cellu- 
lar electricity  was  flowing  in  her  body 
and  it  bridged  the  gap.  Her  subsequent 
sexual  choices  were  almost  exclusively 
members  of  the  opposite  sex. 

For  the  same  reasons,  LSD  is  also  a 
powerful  panacea  for  impotence  and  fri- 
gidity, both  of  which,  like  homosexual- 
ity, are  symbolic  screw-ups.  The  LSD 
experience  puts  you  in  touch  with  the 
wisdom  of  your  body,  of  your  nervous 
system,  of  your  cells,  of  your  organs. 
And  the  closer  you  get  to  the  message 
of  the  body,  the  more  obvious  it  be- 
comes that  it's  constructed  and  designed 
to  procreate  and  keep  the  life  stream  go- 
ing. When  you're  confronted  witli  this 
basic  cellular  fact  under  LSD,  you  real- 
ize that  your  impotency,  or  your  fri- 
gidity, is  caused  by  neuropsychological 
hang-ups  of  fear  or  shame  that  make 
no  sense  to  your  cells,  that  have  nothing 
to  do  with  the  biochemical  forces  inside 
your  body  urging  you  to  merge  and  mate 
with  a  member  of  the  opposite  sex. 
PLAYBOY:  Does  LSD  always  work  as  a  sex- 
ual cure-all? 

LEARY:  Certainly  not.  LSD  is  no  guaran- 
tee of  any  specific  social  or  sexual  out- 
come. One  man  may  take  LSD  and  leave 
wife  and  family  and  go  off  to  be  a  monk 
on  the  banks  of  the  Ganges.  Another 
may  take  LSD  and  go  back  to  his  wife. 
It's  a  highly  individual  situation.  Highly 
unpredictable.  During  LSD  sessions,  you 
see,  there  can  come  a  microscopic  per- 
ception of  your  routine  social  and 
professional  life.  You  may  discover  to 
your  horror  that  you're  living  a  robot 
existence,  that  your  relationships  with 
your  boss,  your  wife  and  your  family  are 
stereotyped,  empty  and  devoid  of  mean- 
ing. At  this  point,  there  might  come  a 
desire  to  renounce  this  hollow  existence, 
to  collect  your  thoughts,  to  go  away  and 
cloister  yourself  from  the  world  like  a 
monk  while  you  figure  out  what  kind  of 
a  life  you  want  to  go  back  to,  if  any. 

Conversely,  we've  found  that  in  giving 
LSD  to  members  of  monastic  sects,  there 
has  been  a  definite  tendency  for  them  to 
leave  the  monastic  life  and  to  find  a  mat- 
ing relationship.  Several  were  men   in 


their  late  40s  who  had  been  monks  for 
15  or  20  years,  but  who  even  at  this  ma- 
ture age  returned  to  society,  married 
and  made  the  heterosexual  adjustment. 
It's  not  coincidental  that  of  all  those  I've 
given  LSD  to,  the  religious  group — more 
than  200  ministers,  priests,  divinity  stu- 
dents and  nuns — has  experienced  the 
most  intense  sexual  reaction.  And  in  two 
religious  groups  that  prize  chastity  and 
celibacy,  there  have  been  wholesale  de- 
fections of  monks  and  nuns  who  left 
their  religious  orders  to  get  married  after 
a  series  of  LSD  experiences.  The  LSD 
session,  you  see,  is  an  overwhelming 
awakening  of  experience;  it  releases  po- 
tent, primal  energies,  and  one  of  these  is 
the  sexual  impulse,  which  is  the  strong- 
est impulse  at  any  level  of  organic  life. 
For  the  first  time  in  their  lives,  perhaps, 
these  people  were  meeting  head  on  the 
powerful  life  forces  that  they  had 
walled  off  with  ritualized  defenses  and 
self-delusions. 

PLAYBOY:  A  great  deal  of  what  is  said 
about  LSD  by  its  proponents,  including 
you,  has  been  couched  in  terms  of  reli- 
gious mysticism.  You  spoke  earlier,  in 
fact,  of  discovering  "divinity"  through 
LSD.  In  what  way  is  the  LSD  experience 
religious? 

IEARY:  It  depends  on  what  you  mean  by 
religion.  For  almost  everyone,  the  LSD 
experience  is  a  confrontation  with  new 
forms  of  wisdom  and  energy  that  dwarf 
and  humiliate  man's  mind.  This  experi- 
ence of  awe  and  revelation  is  often  de- 
scribed as  religious.  I  consider  my  work 
basically  religious,  because  it  has  as  its 
goal  the  systematic  expansion  of  con- 
sciousness and  the  discovery  of  energies 
within,  which  men  call  "divine."  From 
the  psychedelic  point  of  view,  almost  all 
religions  are  attempts— sometimes  limit- 
ed temporally  or  nationally — to  discover 
the  inner  potential.  Well,  LSD  is  West- 
ern yoga.  The  aim  of  all  Eastern  reli- 
gion, like  the  aim  of  LSD,  is  basically  to 
get  high:  that  is,  to  expand  your  con- 
sciousness and  find  ecstasy  and  revela- 
tion within. 

PLAYBOY:  Dr.  Gerald  Klee.of  the  National 
Institute  of  Mental  Health,  has  written: 
"Those  who  say  LSD  expands  conscious- 
ness would  have  the  task  of  defining  the 
terms.  By  any  conventional  definition,  I 
don't  think  it  does  expand  the  conscious- 
ness." What  do  vou  think? 
LEARY:  Well,  he's  using  the  narrow,  con- 
ventional definition  of  consciousness 
that  psychiatrists  have  been  taught:  that 
there  are  two  levels  of  consciousness — 
sleep  and  symbolic  normal  awareness. 
Anything  else  is  insanity.  So  by  conven- 
tional definition,  LSD  does  not  expand 
symbolic  consciousness;  thus,  it  creates 
psychosis.  In  terms  of  his  conventional 
symbol  game,  Dr.  Klee  is  right.  My  con- 
tention is  that  his  definition  is  too  nar- 
row, that  it  comes  from  a  deplorable, 
primitive  and  superstitious  system  of 
consciousness.    My   system  of   conscious- 


ness— attested  to  by  the  experience  of 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  trained  voyag- 
ers who've  taken  LSD — defines  many  dif- 
ferent levels  of  awareness. 
PLAYBOY:  What  are  they? 
LEARY:  The  lowest  level  of  consciousness 
is  sleep — or  stupor,  which  is  produced 
by  narcotics,  barbiturates  and  our  na- 
tional stuporfactant,  alcohol.  The  second 
level  of  consciousness  is  the  conventional 
wakeful  state,  in  which  awareness  is 
hooked  to  conditioned  symhols:  flags, 
dollar  signs,  job  titles,  brand  names, 
party  affiliations  and  the  like.  This  is 
the  level  that  most  people — including 
psychiatrists — regard  as  reality;  they 
don't  know  the  half  of  it.  There  is  a 
third  level  of  awareness,  and  this  is 
the  one  that  I  think  would  be  of 
particular  interest  to  playboy  readers, 
because  most  of  them  are  of  the  younger 
generation,  which  is  much  more  sensual 
than  the  puritanical  Americans  of  the 
older  generation.  This  is  the  sensory 
level  of  awareness.  In  order  to  reach  it, 
you  have  to  have  something  that  will 
turn  off  symbols  and  open  up  your  bil- 
lions of  sensory  cameras  to  the  billions  of 
impulses  that  are  hitting  them.  The 
chemical  that  opens  the  door  to  this  level 
has  been  well  known  for  centuries  to  cul- 
tures that  stress  delicate,  sensitive  regis- 
tration of  sensory  stimulation:  the  Arab 
cultures,  the  Indian  cultures,  the  Mogul 
cultures.  It  is  marijuana.  There  is  no 
question  that  marijuana  is  a  sensual  stim- 
ulator— and  this  explains  not  only  why 
it's  favored  by  young  people  but  why  it 
arouses  fear  and  panic  among  the  mid- 
dle-aged, middle-class,  whiskey-drinking, 
bluenosed  bureaucrats  who  run  the  nar- 
cotics agencies.  If  they  only  knew  what 
they  were  missing. 

But  we  must  bid  a  sad  farewell  to  the 
sensory  level  of  consciousness  and  go  on 
to  the  fourth  level,  which  I  call  the  cel- 
lular level.  It's  well  known  that  the 
stronger  psychedelics  such  as  mescaline 
and  LSD  take  you  beyond  the  senses 
into  a  world  of  cellular  awareness.  Now, 
the  neurological  fact  of  the  matter  is 
that  every  one  of  your  13  billion  brain 
cells  is  hooked  up  to  some  25,000  other 
cells,  and  everything  you  know  comes 
from  a  communication  exchange  at  the 
nerve  endings  of  your  cells.  During  an 
LSD  session,  enormous  clusters  of  these 
cells  are  turned  on,  and  consciousness 
whirls  into  eerie  panoramas  for  which 
we  have  no  words  or  concepts.  Here 
the  metaphor  that's  most  accurate  is 
the  metaphor  of  the  microscope,  which 
brings  into  awareness  cellular  patterns 
that  are  invisible  to  the  naked  eye. 
In  the  same  way,  LSD  brings  into  aware- 
ness the  cellular  conversations  that  are 
inaudible  to  the  normal  consciousness 
and  for  which  we  have  no  adequate  sym- 
bolic language.  You  become  aware  of 
processes  you  were  never  tuned  in  to  be- 
fore. You  feel  yourself  sinking  down  into 
the  soft  tissue  swamp  of  your  own  body, 


slowly  drifting  down  dark  red  waterways 
and  floating  through  capillary  canals, 
softly  propelled  through  endless  cellular 
factories,  ancient  fibrous  clockworks — 
ticking,  clicking,  chugging,  pumping  re- 
lentlessly. Being  swallowed  up  this  way 
by  the  tissue  industries  and  the  bloody, 
sinewy  carryings-on  inside  your  body  can 
be  an  appalling  experience  the  first  time 
it  happens  to  you.  But  it  can  also  be 
an  awesome  one — fearful,  but  full  of 
reverence  and  wonder. 
PLAYBOY:  Is  there  a  fifth  level  of  aware- 
ness? 

LEARY:  Yes,  and  this  one  is  even  more 
strange  and  terrifying.  This  is  the  prece\- 
lular  level,  which  is  experienced  only 
under  a  heavy  dosage  of  LSD.  Your  nerve 
cells  are  aware — as  Professor  Einstein 
wis  aware — that  all  matter,  all  structure, 
is  pulsating  energy;  well,  there  is  a  shat- 
tering moment  in  the  deep  psychedelic 
session  when  your  body,  and  the  world 
around  you,  dissolves  into  shimmering 
latticeworks  of  pulsating  white  waves, 
into  silent,  subcellular  worlds  of  shut- 
tling energy.  But  this  phenomenon  is 
nothing  new.  It's  been  reported  by  mys- 
tics and  visionaries  throughout  the  last 
4000  years  of  recorded  history  as  "the 
white  light"  or  the  "dance  of  energy." 
Suddenly  you  realize  that  everything  you 
thought  of  as  reality  or  even  as  life  itself 
— including  your  body — is  just  a  dance 
of  particles.  You  find  yourself  horribly 
alone  in  a  dead,  impersonal  world  of  raw 
energy  feeding  on  your  sense  organs. 
This,  of  course,  is  one  of  the  oldest  Ori- 
ental philosophic  notions,  that  nothing 
exists  except  in  the  chemistry  of  your 
own  consciousness.  But  when  it  first 
really  happens  to  you,  through  the  ex- 
perience of  LSD,  it  can  come  as  a 
terrorizing,  isolating  discovery.  At  this 
point,  the  unprepared  LSD  subject 
often  screams  out:  "I'm  dead!"  And  he 
sits  there  transfigured  with  fear,  afraid 
to  move.  For  the  experienced  voyager, 
however,  this  revelation  can  be  exalting: 
You've  climbed  inside  Einstein's  formula, 
penetrated  to  the  ultimate  nature  of  mat- 
ter, and  you're  pulsing  in  harmony  with 
its  primal,  cosmic  beat. 
PLAYBOY:  Has  this  happened  to  you  often 
during  a  session? 

LEARY:  It's  happened  to  me  about  half  of 
the  311  times  I've  taken  LSD.  And  every 
time  it  begins  to  happen,  no  matter  how 
much  experience  you've  had,  there  is 
that  moment  of  terror — because  nobody 
likes  to  see  the  comfortable  world  of 
objects  and  symbols  and  even  cells  dis- 
integrate into  the  ultimate  physical 
design. 

PLAYBOY:  Do  you  think  there  may  be  a 
deeper  level  of  consciousness  beyond  the 
precellular? 

LEARY:  I  hope  so.  We  know  that  there 
are  many  other  levels  of  energy  within 
and  around  us,  and  I  hope  that  within 
our  lifetimes  we  will  have  these  opened 
up  to  us,  because  the  fact  is  that  there 


is  no  form  of  energy  on  this  planet  that 
isn't  recorded  somewhere  in  your  body. 
Built  within  every  cell  are  molecular 
strands  of  memory  and  awareness  called 
the  DNA  code — the  genetic  blueprint 
that  has  designed  and  executed  the  con- 
struction of  your  body.  This  is  an  an- 
cient strand  of  molecules  that  possesses 
memories  of  every  previous  organism 
that  has  contributed  to  your  present 
existence.  In  your  DNA  code,  you  have 
the  genetic  history  of  your  father  and 
mother.  It  goes  back,  back,  back  through 
the  generations,  through  the  eons.  Your 
body  carries  a  protein  record  of  every- 
thing that's  happened  to  you  since  the 
moment  you  were  conceived  as  a  one-cell 
organism.  It's  a  living  history  of  every 
form  of  energy  transformation  on  this 
planet  back  to  that  thunderbolt  in  the 
Pre-Cambrian  mud  that  spawned  the  life 
process  over  two  billion  years  ago.  When 
LSD  subjects  report  retrogression  and 
reincarnation  visions,  this  is  not  mysteri- 
ous or  supernatural.  It's  simply  modern 
biogenetics. 

PLAYBOY:  Tell  us  more  about  these  visions. 
LEARY:  Well,  we  don't  know  how  these 
memories  are  stored,  but  countless 
events  from  early  and  even  intra-uterine 
life  are  registered  in  your  brain  and  can 
be  flashed  into  consciousness  during  an 
LSD  experience. 

PLAYBOY:  Do  you  merely  remember  them, 
or  do  you  actually  relive  them? 
LEARY:  The  experiences  that  come  from 
LSD  are  actually  relived — in  sight, 
sound,  smell,  taste  and  touch — exactly 
the  way  they  happened  before. 
PLAYBOY:  If  it's  an  experience  from  very 
early  life,  how  can  you  be  sure  it's  a  true 
memory  rather  than  a  vivid  hallucination? 
LEARY:  It's  possible  to  check  out  some  of 
these  ancient  memories,  but  for  the  most 
part  these  memory  banks,  which  are 
built  into  your  protein  cellular  strands, 
can  never  be  checked  on  by  external  ob- 
servation. Who  can  possibly  corroborate 
what  your  nervous  system  picked  up  be- 
fore your  birth,  inside  your  mother?  But 
the  obvious  fact  is  that  your  nervous  sys- 
tem was  operating  while  you  were  still 
in  the  uterus.  It  was  receiving  and  re- 
cording units  of  consciousness.  Why, 
then,  is  it  surprising  that  at  some  later 
date,  if  you  have  the  chemical  key,  you 
can  release  these  memories  of  the  nine 
perilous  and  exciting  months  before  you 
were  born? 

PLAYBOY:   Can   these  memory   visions  be 
made  selective?  Is  it  possible  to  travel 
back  in  time  at  will? 
LEARY:  Yes,  it  is.  That  happens  to  be  the 
particular  project  that  I've  been  working 
on  most  recently  with  LSD.  I've  charted 
my  own  family  tree  and  traced  it  back 
as  far  as  I  can.  I've  tried  to  plumb  the 
gene    pools   from    which    my    ancestors 
emerged  in  Ireland  and  France. 
PLAYBOY:  With  what  success? 
LEARY:  Well,  there  are  certain  moments 
in  my  evolutionary  history  that  I  can 


reach  all  the  time,  but  there  are  certain 
untidy  corners  in  my  racial  path  that  I 
often  get  boxed  into,  and  because  they 
are  frightening,  I  freak  out  and  open  my 
eyes  and  stop  it.  In  many  of  these  ses- 
sions, back  about  300  years,  I  often  run 
across  a  particular  French-appearing 
man  with  a  black  mustache,  a  rather 
dangerous-looking  guy.  And  there  are 
several  highly  eccentric  recurrent  se- 
quences in  an  Anglo-Saxon  country  that 
have  notably  embarrassed  me  when  I  re- 
lived them  in  LSD  sessions — goings  on 
that  shocked  my  20th  Century  person. 
PLAYBOY:  What  sort  of  goings  on? 
LEARY:  Moments  of  propagation — scenes 
of  rough  ancestral  sexuality  in  Irish  bar- 
rooms, in  haystacks,  in  canopied  beds,  in 
covered  wagons,  on  beaches,  on  the  moist 
jungle  floor — and  moments  of  crisis  in 
which  my  forebears  escape  from  fang, 
from  spear,  from  conspiracy,  from  tidal 
wave  and  avalanche.  I've  concluded  that 
the  imprints  most  deeply  engraved  in 
the  neurological  memory  bank  have  to 
do  with  these  moments  of  life-affirming 
exultation  and  exhilaration  in  the  per- 
petuation and  survival  of  the  species. 
PLAYBOY:  But  how  can  you  be  sure  they 
ever  happened? 

LEARY:  You  can't.  They  may  all  be  noth- 
ing more  than  luridly  melodramatic 
Saturday  serials  conjured  up  by  my  fore- 
brain.  But  whatever  they  are — memory  or 
imagination — it's  the  most  exciting  ad- 
venture I've  ever  been  involved  in. 
PLAYBOY:  In  this  connection,  according  to 
a  spokesman  for  the  student  left,  many 
former  campus  activists  who've  gone 
the  LSD  route  are  "more  concerned 
with  what's  happening  in  their  heads 
than  what's  happening  in  the  world." 
Any  comment? 

LEARY:  There's  a  certain  amount  of  truth 
in  that.  The  insight  of  LSD  leads  you  to 
concern  yourself  more  with  internal  or 
spiritual  values;  you  realize  that  it 
doesn't  make  any  difference  what  you  do 
on  the  outside  unless  you  change  the  in- 
side. If  all  the  Negroes  and  left-wing  col- 
lege students  in  the  world  had  Cadillacs 
and  full  control  of  society,  they  would 
still  be  involved  in  an  anthill  social  sys- 
tem unless  they  opened  themselves  up 
first. 

PLAYBOY:  Aren't  these  young  ex-activists 
among  an  increasing  number  of  stu- 
dents, writers,  artists  and  musicians 
whom  one  critic  has  called  "the  psyche- 
delic dropouts" — LSD  users  who  find 
themselves  divested  of  motivation,  un- 
able to  readjust  to  reality  or  to  resume 
their  roles  in  society? 
LEARY:  There  is  an  LSD  dropout  prob- 
lem, but  it's  nothing  to  worry  about.  It's 
something  to  cheer.  The  lesson  I  have 
learned  from  over  300  LSD  sessions,  and 
which  I  have  been  passing  on  to  others, 
can  be  stated  in  six  syllables:  Turn  on, 
tune  in,  drop  out.  "Turn  on"  means  to 
contact  the  ancient  energies  and  wis- 
doms that  are  built  into  your  nervous 


system.  They  provide  unspeakable  pleas- 
ure and  revelation.  "Tune  in"  means  to 
harness  and  communicate  these  new  per- 
spectives in  a  harmonious  dance  with 
the  external  world.  "Drop  out"  means  to 
detach  yourself  from  the  tribal  game. 
Current  models  of  social  adjustment — 
mechanized,  computerized,  socialized, 
intellectualized,  televised,  Sanforized — 
make  no  sense  to  the  new  LSD  genera- 
tion, who  see  clearly  that  American 
society  is  becoming  an  air-conditioned 
anthill.  In  every  generation  of  human  his- 
tory, thoughtful  men  have  turned  on 
and  dropped  out  of  the  tribal  game,  and 
thus  stimulated  the  larger  society  to 
lurch  ahead.  Every  historical  advance 
has  resulted  from  the  stern  pressure  of 
visionary  men  who  have  declared  their 
independence  from  the  game:  "Sorry, 
George  III,  we  don't  buy  your  model. 
We're  going  to  try  something  new"; 
"Sorry,  Louis  XVI,  we've  got  a  new  idea. 
Deal  us  out";  "Sorry,  L.  B.  J.,  it's  time  to 
mosey  on  beyond  the  Great  Society." 

The  reflex  reaction  of  society  to  the 
creative  dropout  is  panic  and  irritation. 
If  anyone  questions  the  social  order,  he 
threatens  the  whole  shaky  edifice.  The 
automatic,  angry  reaction  to  the  creative 
dropout  is  that  he  will  become  a  parasite 
on  the  hard-working,  conforming  citizen. 
This  is  not  true.  The  LSD  experience 
does  not  lead  to  passivity  and  withdraw- 
al; it  spurs  a  driving  hunger  to  commu- 
nicate in  new  forms,  in  better  ways,  to 
express  a  more  harmonious  message,  to 
live  a  better  life.  The  LSD  cult  has  al- 
ready wrought  revolutionary  changes  in 
American  culture.  If  you  were  to  con- 
duct a  poll  of  the  creative  young  musi- 
cians in  this  country,  you'd  find  that  at 
least  80  percent  are  using  psychedelic 
drugs  in  a  systematic  way.  And  this  new 
psychedelic  style  has  produced  not  only 
a  new  rhythm  in  modern  music  but  a 
new  decor  for  our  discotheques,  a  new 
form  of  film  making,  a  new  kinetic 
visual  art,  a  new  literature,  and  has 
begun  to  revise  our  philosophic  and 
psychological    thinking. 

Remember,  it's  the  college  kids  who 
are  turning  on — the  smartest  and  most 
promising  of  the  youngsters.  What  an 
exciting  prospect:  a  generation  of  crea- 
tive youngsters  refusing  to  march  in 
step,  refusing  to  go  to  offices,  refusing  to 
sign  up  on  the  installment  plan,  refusing 
to  climb  aboard  the  treadmill. 
PLAYBOY:  What  will  they  do? 
LEARY:  Don't  worry.  Each  one  will  work 
out  his  individual  solution.  Some  will 
return  to  the  establishment  and  inject 
their  new  ideas.  Some  will  live  under- 
ground as  self-employed  artists,  artisans 
and  writers.  Some  are  already  forming 
small  communities  out  of  the  country. 
Many  are  starting  schools  for  children 
and  adults  who  wish  to  learn  the  use  of 
their  sense  organs.  Psychedelic  businesses 
are  springing  up:  bookstores,  art  galler- 
ies.  Psychedelic   industries  may   involve 


more  manpower  in  the  future  than  the 
automobile  industry  has  produced  in  the 
last  20  years.  In  our  technological  society 
of  the  future,  the  problem  will  be  not  to 
get  people  to  work,  but  to  develop  grace- 
ful, fulfilling  ways  of  living  a  more 
serene,  beautiful  and  creative  life.  Psy- 
chedelics  will  help  to  point  the  way. 
PLAYBOY:  Concerning  LSD's  influence  on 
creativity,  Dr.  B.  William  Murphy,  a 
psychoanalyst  for  the  National  Institute 
of  Mental  Health,  takes  the  view  that 
there  is  no  evidence  "that  drugs  of  any 
kind  increase  creative  potency.  One  un- 
fortunate effect  is  to  produce  an  illusion 
dangerous  to  people  who  are  creative, 
who  cease  then  to  be  motivated  to  pro- 
duce something  that  is  genuinely  new. 
And  the  illusion  is  bad  in  making  those 
who  are  not  creative  get  the  idea  that 
they  are."  What's  your  reaction? 
LEARY:  It's  unfortunate  that  most  of  the 
scientific  studies  on  creativity  have  been 
done  by  psychologists  who  don't  have 
one  creative  bone  in  their  body.  They 
have  studied  people  who  by  definition 
are  emphatically  uncreative — namely, 
graduate  students.  Is  it  any  wonder  that 
all  the  "scientific"  studies  of  LSD  and 
creativity  have  shown  no  creative  re- 
sults? But  to  answer  your  question,  I 
must  admit  that  LSD  and  marijuana  do 
not  allow  you  to  walk  to  the  piano  and 
ripple  off  great  fugues.  Psychedelic 
drugs,  particularly  marijuana,  merely  en- 
hance the  senses.  They  allow  you  to  see 
and  hear  new  patterns  of  energy  that 
suggest  new  patterns  for  composition.  In 
this  way,  they  enhance  the  creative  per- 
spective, but  the  ability  to  convert  your 
new  perspective,  however  glorious  it 
may  be,  into  a  communication  form  still 
requires  the  technical  skill  of  a  musician 
or  a  painter  or  a  composer. 

But  if  you  want  to  find  out  whether 
LSD  and  marijuana  have  helped  creative 
people,  don't  listen  to  a  psychiatrist; 
don't  listen  to  a  Government  bureau- 
crat. Find  the  artist  and  ask  him.  If  you 
want  to  find  out  about  creativity,  ask  the 
creative  person.  If  you  want  to  know 
what  LSD  does,  and  whether  it's  good  or 
bad,  don't  listen  to  a  cop;  don't  listen  to 
messianic  fanatics  like  Timothy  Leary. 
Find  some  friend  who  has  taken  LSD 
and  ask  him.  He's  the  person  to  believe 
— because  you'll  know  how  likely  he  is  to 
distort  things — and  then  you'll  be  able  to 
judge  on  the  basis  of  his  statements  what 
LSD  has  done  for  him.  Then  ask  other 
friends  about  their  experiences.  Base 
your  opinion  about  LSD  on  a  series  of 
such  interviews,  and  you  will  have  col- 
lected more  hard  data  than  any  of  the 
public  health  officials  and  police  officers 
who  are  making  daily  scare  statements  to 
the  press  these  days. 
PLAYBOY:  Are  any  of  these  scare  state- 
ments true?  According  to  a  recent  report 
on  narcotics  addiction  published  by  the 
Medical  Society  of  the  County  of  New 
York,   for  example,   "those   with   unsta- 


ble personalities  may  experience  LSD- 
induced  psychoses."  Is  that  true? 
LEARY:  In  over  3000  people  that  I  have 
personally  observed  taking  LSD,  we've 
had  only  four  cases  of  prolonged  psy- 
choses—a matter  of,  say,  two  or  three 
weeks  after  the  session.  All  of  these  had 
been  in  a  mental  hospital  before,  and 
they  were  people  who  could  not  commit 
themselves  to  any  stable  relationship. 
And  all  of  these  people  had  nothing 
going  in  their  lives.  They  were  drifting 
or  floating,  with  no  home  or  family  or 
any  roots,  no  stable,  ongoing  life  situa- 
tion to  return  to.  It's  dangerous  to  take 
a  trip  if  you  have  no  internal  trust  and 
no  external  place  to  turn  to  afterward. 
PLAYBOY:  The  same  New  York  Medical 
Society  report  also  stated  that  "normal, 
well-adjusted  persons  can  undergo  an 
acute  psychotic  break  under  the  influence 
of  LSD."  Is  there  any  truth  to  that? 
LEARY:  Everyone,  normal  or  neurotic, 
experiences  some  fear  and  confusion 
during  the  high-dose  LSD  session.  The 
outcome  and  duration  of  this  confusion 
depends  upon  your  environment  and  your 
traveling  companions.  That's  why  it's 
tremendously  important  that  the  LSD 
session  be  conducted  in  a  protected 
place,  that  the  person  be  prepared  and 
that  he  have  an  experienced  and  under- 
standing guide  to  support  and  shield 
him  from  intrusion  and  interruption. 
When  unprepared  people  take  LSD  in 
bad  surroundings,  and  when  there's  no 
one  present  who  has  the  skill  and  cour- 
age to  guide  them  through  it,  then  para- 
noid episodes  are  possible. 
PLAYBOY:  Will  you  describe  them? 
LEARY:  There  are  any  number  of  forms  a 
paranoid  episode  can  take.  You  can  find 
yourself  feeling  that  you've  lived  most  of 
your  life  in  a  universe  completely  of 
your  own,  not  really  touching  and  har- 
monizing with  the  flow  of  the  people 
and  the  energies  around  you.  It  seems  to 
you  that  everyone  else,  and  every  other 
organism  in  creation,  is  in  beatific  com- 
munion, and  only  you  are  isolated  by 
your  egocentricity.  Every  action  around 
you  fits  perfectly  into  this  paranoid 
mosaic.  Every  glance,  every  look  of  bore- 
dom, every  sound,  every  smile  becomes  a 
confirmation  of  the  fact  that  everyone 
knows  that  you  are  the  only  one  in  the 
universe  that's  not  swinging  lovingly 
and  gracefully  with  the  rest  of  the  cos- 
mic dance.  I've  experienced  this  myself. 

I've  also  sat  with  hundreds  of  people 
who  have  been  panicked  because  they 
were  trapped  at  the  level  of  cellular 
reincarnation,  where  they  looked  out 
and  saw  that  their  body  had  scales  like  a 
fish  or  felt  that  they  had  turned  into  an 
animal.  And  I've  sat  with  people  who 
were  caught  on  the  fifth  level,  in  that 
eerie,  inhuman  world  of  shuttling  vibra- 
tions. But  all  these  episodes  can  be  dealt 
with  easily  by  an  experienced  guide  who 
recognizes  where  the  LSD  tripper  is 
caught.   He   can   bring  you   back   down 


quite  simply  by  holding  a  candle  in 
front  of  you,  or  getting  you  to  concen- 
trate on  your  breathing,  or  having  you 
lie  down  and  getting  you  to  feel  your 
body  merging  with  the  mattress  or  the 
floor.  If  he  understands  the  map  of  con- 
sciousness, it's  very  easy  to  bring  you 
back  to  a  more  recognizable  and  less 
frightening  level.  With  his  help,  you'll 
be  able  to  exult  in  and  learn  from  the 
experience. 

If  he's  frightened  or  uncomprehend- 
ing, however,  or  if  he  acts  so  as  to  pro- 
tect his  own  social  interests,  your  own 
terror  and  confusion  are  naturally  in- 
creased. If  he  treats  you  as  a  psychotic 
.rather  than  as  one  who  is  seriously  grop- 
ing with  basic  problems  that  you  should 
be  encouraged  to  face  and  work 
through,  you  may  be  forced  into  a  psy- 
chotic state.  Every  case  of  prolonged 
LSD  psychosis  is  the  fault  not  of  the 
drug  nor  of  the  drug  taker  but  of  the 
people  around  him  who  lose  their  cool 
and  call  the  cops  or  the  doctors.  The  les- 
son here  is  to  fear  neither  LSD  nor  your 
own  psychological  nature — which  is  basi- 
cally OK — but  to  fear  the  diagnosing 
mind  of  the  psychiatrist.  Ninety  percent 
of  the  bad  LSD  trips  are  provoked  by 
psychiatric  propaganda,  which  creates  an 
atmosphere  of  fear  rather  than  of  cour- 
age and  trust.  If  the  psychiatrists  had 
their  way,  we'd  all  be  patients. 
PLAYBOY:  Speaking  of  patients,  a  recent 
Time  essay  reported  that  a  survey  in  Los 
Angeles  "showed  as  many  as  200  victims 
of  bad  trips  in  the  city's  hospitals  at  one 
time."  Does  that  sound  to  you  like  a 
realistic  figure? 

LEARY:  I'd  like  to  know  who  conducted 
that  survey  and  where  they  got  their 
figures,  because  it's  contradicted  by  the 
known  facts.  I  was  recently  told  by  the 
director  of  a  large  California  hospital, 
which  handles  LSD  cases,  that  most  LSD 
panic  subjects  are  given  a  tranquilizer 
and  sent  home  without  even  being  ad- 
mitted. The  same  is  true  at  Bellevue  and 
throughout  the  country. 
PLAYBOY:  In  the  same  essay,  Time  wrote: 
"Under  the  influence  of  LSD,  nonswim- 
mers  think  they  can  swim,  and  others 
think  they  can  fly.  One  young  man  tried 
to  stop  a  car  on  Los  Angeles'  Wilshire 
Boulevard  and  was  hit  and  killed.  A 
magazine  salesman  became  convinced 
that  he  was  the  Messiah."  Are  these 
cases,  and  others  like  them,  representa- 
tive reactions  to  LSD,  in  your  opinion? 
LEARY:  I  would  say  that  one  case  in 
10,000  is  going  to  flip  out  and  run  out 
into  the  street  and  do  something  bizarre. 
But  these  are  the  cases  that  get  reported 
in  the  papers.  There  are  3000  Americans 
who  die  every  year  from  barbiturates 
and  it  never  hits  the  papers.  Thousands 
more  die  in  car  crashes  and  from  lung 
cancer  induced  by  smoking.  That  isn't 
news,  either.  But  one  LSD  kid  rushes 
out  and  takes  off  his  clothes  in  the  street 
and  it's  headlines  in  the  New  York  Daily 


News.  If  one  nut  who's  a  member  of  the 
narcotics  squad  from  the  Los  Angeles 
police  force  gets  drunk  and  climbs  into 
an  airplane  and  threatens  the  pilot, 
that's  no  reason  for  grounding  all  air- 
planes, calling  alcohol  illegal,  outlawing 
guns  and  dissolving  the  narcotics  bureau 
of  the  Los  Angeles  police  force.  So  one 
episode  out  of  10,000  LSD  cases  is  no 
reason  for  any  kind  of  hand  wringing 
and  grandmotherly  panic. 
PIAYBOY:  A  recent  case  of  this  nature  in- 
volved a  young  man  who  contended  that 
he  killed  his  mother-in-law  while  he  was 
on  LSD.  Isn't  that  a  cause  for  concern? 
LEARY:  Yes — but  only  because  this  one  ep- 
isode has  led  to  some  psychiatrists  and 
police  calling  LSD  a  homicidal  drug. 
Actually,  there's  no  evidence  that  that 
unfortunate  boy  ever  took  LSD.  He  was 
obviously  attempting  a  cop-out  when  he 
talked  to  the  police  about  it  afterward. 
PIAYBOY:  There  have  also  been  reports  of 
suicide  under  the  influence  of  LSD.  Does 
this  happen? 

LEARY:  In  23  years  of  LSD  use,  there  has 
been  one  definite  case  of  suicide  during 
the  LSD  session.  This  was  a  woman  in 
Switzerland  who'd  been  given  LSD  with- 
out her  knowledge.  She  thought  she  was 
going  crazy  and  jumped  out  of  the  win- 
dow. But  it  wasn't  that  the  LSD  poi- 
soned her.  The  unexpected  LSD  led  to 
such  panic  and  confusion  that  she  killed 
herself.  There  have  been  other  rumors 
about  LSD  panics  leading  to  suicide,  but 
I  am  waiting  for  the  scientific  evidence. 
In  more  than  a  million  LSD  cases,  there 
haven't  been  more  than  one  or  two  doc- 
umented cases  of  homicide  or  suicide  at- 
tributable to  the  LSD  experience. 
PLAYBOY:  Though  it  hasn't  led  to  any  re- 
ported deaths,  a  number  of  LSD  panics 
have  been  attributed  to  the  experience 
of  many  users,  in  the  midst  of  a  session, 
that  they're  about  to  have  a  heart  attack. 
Is  this  a  common  occurrence? 
LEARY:  Fairly  common.  When  somebody 
says  to  us  in  an  LSD  session,  "My  heart's 
going  to  stop!"  we  say,  "OK,  fine. 
That's  a  new  experience,  nothing  to  be 
afraid  of.  Let  it  stop."  There  is  no  phys- 
iological change  in  your  heart,  but  the 
experience  is  that  the  heart  is  stopping. 
On  LSD,  you  see,  you  may  actually  hear 
the  thump  of  your  heartbeat.  You  be- 
come aware  of  its  pulsing  nerves  and 
muscle  fibers  straining  for  the  next  beat. 
How  can  they  possibly  do  this  over  and 
over  again?  If  you're  unprepared  for  it, 
this  can  become  a  terror  that  it  cannot 
continue.  Because  of  LSD's  distention  of 
the  time  dimension,  you  may  wait  what 
seems  like  five  hours  for  the  second  beat. 
Then  you  wait  again,  and  you  wait,  and 
you  are  aware  of  the  millions  of  cells 
that  must  be  tiring  out;  they  may  not 
have  the  strength  to  beat  again.  You're 
afraid  that  your  heart  is  going  to  burst. 
Then  finally — thump!  At  last!  But  did 
it  come  slower  this  time?  Is  it  Stopping? 
You  feel  the  blood  throbbing  in  your 


heart.  You  feel  the  ventricles  opening 
and  closing;  there's  a  hole  in  your 
heart!  The  blood  is  flooding  your 
body!  You're  drowning  in  your  own 
blood!  "Help!  Get  me  a  doctor!"  you 
may  shout.  If  this  kind  of  episode  occurs, 
of  course,  all  that's  necessary  to  allay 
your  fears  are  a  few  words  of  under- 
standing and  reassurance  from  an  expe- 
rienced guide  and  companion,  who 
should  be  with  you  at  all  times. 
PIAYBOY:  Dr.  Jonathan  Cole,  of  the  Na- 
tional Institute  of  Mental  Health,  has 
said  that  psychedelic  drugs  "can  be  dan- 
gerous. .  .  .  People  go  into  panic  states 
in  which  they  are  ready  to  jump  out  of 
their  skins.  .  .  .  The  benefits  are  ob- 
scure." What  do  you  say? 
LEARY:  Based  on  the  evidence  that  Dr. 
Cole  has  had  at  hand,  he  is  justified  in 
saying  that.  Dr.  Cole  undoubtedly  has 
never  taken  LSD  himself.  He  has  spoh- 
sored  research  that  has  been  done — in- 
deed, must  be  done — in  mental  hospitals, 
under  psychiatric  supervision.  But  this  is 
the  worst  possible  place  to  take  LSD. 
Take  LSD  in  a  nuthouse  and  you'll  have 
a  nuthouse  experience.  These  poor  pa- 
tients are  usually  not  even  told  what 
drugs  they're  given;  they're  not  pre- 
pared. I  consider  this  psychological  rape. 
So  I'm  not  surprised  that  the  cases  Dr. 
Cole  has  heard  about  from  his  research- 
ers are  negative. 

But  Dr.  Cole  doesn't  listen  to  the 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  people  who 
have  taken  LSD  under  intelligent,  aes- 
thetic, carefully  planned  circumstances 
and  have  had  their  lives  changed  for  the 
better.  He  doesn't  receive  the  hundred 
letters  a  week  that  I  receive  from  people 
who  are  profoundly  grateful  to  have 
been  dramatically  opened  up  by  LSD. 
He  hears  only  the  horror  stories.  If  you 
talk  to  a  mortician,  you'll  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  everyone  who  is  of  any 
importance  is  dead.  If  you  talk  to  a  law- 
enforcement  officer,  you'll  find  that  prac- 
tically everyone  is  a  criminal,  actual  or 
potential.  And  if  you  talk  to  a  psychi- 
atrist, you'll  hear  nothing  but  gloomy 
lexicons  of  psychopathology.  What  Dr. 
Cole  thinks  about  LSD  is  irrelevant,  be- 
cause for  every  case  that  his  Federal  re- 
searchers have  studied,  there  are  5000 
serious-minded,  courageous  young  lay- 
men out  in  the  universities  and  out  in 
the  seminaries  and  in  their  own  homes 
and  on  the  beaches  who  are  taking 
LSD  and  having  fantastically  beautiful 
experiences. 

PLAYBOY:  When  you  testified  in  May  be- 
fore a  Senate  subcommittee  investigating 
juvenile  delinquency  and  drugs,  you 
took  your  teenage  son  and  daughter 
along.  Why  not  Mrs.  Leary? 
LEARY:  The  mother  of  my  two  children 
died  in   1955. 

PLAYBOY:  Didn't  you  marry  again? 
LEARY:  Yes — to  a  beautiful  model  named 
Mena.    The    LSD    session    I    described 
earlier  was  with  her. 


PIAYBOY:  To  return  to  your  children: 
Have  you  allowed  or  encouraged  them 
to  use  marijuana  and  LSD? 
LEARY:  Yes.  I  have  no  objection  to  them 
expanding  their  consciousness  through 
the' use  of  sacramental  substances  in  ac- 
cord with  their  spiritual  growth  and 
well-being.  At  Harvard,  in  Mexico  and 
here  at  Millbrook,  both  of  my  children 
have  witnessed  more  psychedelic  sessions 
than  any  psychiatrist  in  the  country. 
PLAYBOY:  At  most  of  the  psychedelic  ses- 
sions you've  conducted  in  the  course  of 
research,  as  you've  said  elsewhere,  you 
and  your  associates  have  turned  on  with 
your  subjects — and  not  in  the  laboratory 
but  on  beaches,  in  meadows,  living  rooms 
and  even  Buddhist  temples.  In  the  opin- 
ion of  most  authorities,  this  highly  un- 
conventional therapeutic  technique  is 
not  only  impractical  but  irrational  and 
irresponsible.  How  do  you  justify  it? 
LEARY:  This  sort  of  criticism  has  ruined 
my  reputation  in  conventional  research 
circles,  but  it  simply  betrays  ignorance 
of  the  way  LSD  works.  You  have  to  take 
it  with  your  patient — or  at  least  to  have 
taken  it  yourself — -in  order  to  empathize 
with  and  follow  him  as  he  goes  from  one 
level  to  another.  If  the  therapist  has 
never  taken  it,  he's  sitting  there  with 
his  sticky  molasses  Freudian  psychiatric 
chessboard  attempting  to  explain  experi- 
ences that  are  far  beyond  the  narrow 
limits  of  that  particular  system. 
PLAYBOY:  You've  also  been  criticized  for 
being  insufficiently  selective  in  the 
screening  of  subjects  to  whom  you've 
administered  LSD. 

LEARY:  We  have  been  willing  and  eager 
to  run  LSD  sessions  with  anyone  in  any 
place  that  made  collaborative  sense  to 
me  and  the  subject.  We've  never  given 
LSD  to  anyone  for  our  own  selfish  pur- 
poses, or  for  selfish  purposes  of  his  own; 
but  if  any  reasonably  stable  individual 
wanted  to  develop  his  own  consciousness, 
we  turned  him  on.  This  ruined  our 
reputation  with  scientists,  of  course,  but 
it  also  made  possible  a  fantastically  suc- 
cessful record:  99  percent  of  the  people 
who  took  LSD  with  us  had  fabulous  ex- 
periences. None  of  our  subjects  flipped 
out  and  went  to  Bellevue;  they  walked 
out  of  the  session  room  with  messianic 
gleams  in  their  eyes. 
PLAYBOY:  Even  if  only  one  percent  of 
your  subjects  had  bad  experiences,  is  it 
worth  the  risk? 

LEARY:  That  question  can  be  answered 
only  by  the  individual.  When  men  set 
out  for  Plymouth  in  a  leaky  boat  to  pur- 
sue a  new  spiritual  way  of  life,  of  course 
they  were  taking  risks.  But  the  risks  of 
the  voyage  were  less  than  the  risks  of  re- 
maining in  a  spiritual  plague  area,  im- 
mobilized from  the  possibility  of  change 
by  their  fears  of  taking  a  risk.  No  Gov- 
ernment bureau  or  Big  Brother  doctor 
can  be  allowed  to  decide  who  is  going  to 
take  the  risks  involved  in  this  20th 
Century   voyage   of   spiritual   discovery. 


PLAYBOY:  Yet  restrictive  and  prohibitive 
laws  against  the  use  of  LSD  have  already 
been  passed  in  California,  Nevada  and 
New  Jersey,  and  several  members  of 
Congress  have  urged  Federal  legislation 
outlawing  its  manufacture  or  possession. 
LEARY:  Such  laws  are  unrealistic  and  un- 
constitutional. Over  15  percent  of  col- 
lege students  are  currently  using  LSD. 
Do  the  hard-arteried  politicians  and  po- 
lice types  really  want  to  put  our  bright- 
est and  most  creative  youngsters  in  prison 
for  possession  of  a  colorless,  odorless, 
tasteless,  nonaddictive,  mind-opening  sub- 
stance? Irrational,  senile  legislation  pre- 
venting people  from  pursuing  private, 
intimate  experiences — sexual  or  spiritual 
— cannot  and  will  not  be  obeyed.  We  are 
currently  planning  to  appeal  any  convic- 
tion for  possession  of  LSD  on  con- 
stitutional grounds.  But  the  Federal 
Government  is  opposed  to  laws  penaliz- 
ing possession  of  LSD,  because  it 
recognizes  the  impossibility  of  enforce- 
ment and  the  unconstitutionality  of 
such  statutes.  Of  course,  this  ambiguous 
situation  is  temporary.  In  15  years,  the 
bright  kids  who  are  turning  on  now  will 
be  shaping  public  opinion,  writing  our 
novels,  running  our  universities  and  re- 
pealing the  hysterical  laws  that  are  now 
being  passed. 

PLAYBOY:  In  what  way  are  they  hysterical? 
LEARY:  They're  hysterical  because  the  men 
who  are  passing  them  have  allowed 
their  ignorance  of  LSD  to  escalate  into 
irrationality.  Instinctively,  they  put  LSD 
in  the  same  bag  with  heroin.  They  think 
of  drug  taking  as  a  criminal  activity 
practiced  by  stuporous  escapists  and 
crazed,  deranged  minds.  The  daily  di- 
atribes of  police  officials  and  many  legis- 
lators to  that  effect  completely  ignore 
the  fact  that  the  use  of  LSD  is  a  white- 
collar,  upper-middle-class,  college-educat- 
ed phenomenon.  The  LSD  user  is  not  a 
criminal  type.  He's  not  an  underground 
character  or  a  junkie.  He  doesn't  seek 
to  hide,  or  to  apologize  for,  his  activities. 
But  while  more  and  more  laws  are  be- 
ing passed  restricting  these  activities, 
more  and  more  people  are  engaging 
in  them.  LSD  is  being  manufactured  by 
people  in  their  own  homes  and  in  small 
laboratories.  If  this  continues,  in  ten 
years  the  LSD  group  will  constitute  one 
of  our  largest  minorities.  Then  what  are 
the  lawmakers  going  to  do? 
PLAYBOY:  What  should  they  do,  in  your 
opinion? 

LEARY:  As  they  learn  more  about  LSD,  I 
think — I  hope — they  will  recognize  that 
there  will  have  to  be  special  legislation. 
There  should  be  laws  about  the  manu- 
facture of  LSD.  It  is  incredibly  powerful 
and  can  be  a  frightening  experience.  It 
is  not  a  narcotic  and  not  a  medical  drug; 
it  doesn't  cure  any  illness.  It  is  a  new 
form  of  energy.  Just  as  a  new  form  of 
legislation  had  to  be  developed  for  ra- 
dioactive isotopes,  so  will  there  need  to 
be  something  comparable  for  LSD.  And 


I  think  some  LSD  equivalent  of  the 
Atomic  Energy  Commission  and  some 
special  licensing  procedures  should  be  set 
up  to  deal  with  this  new  class  of  drugs. 
PLAYBOY:  What  sort  of  procedures  would 
you  recommend? 

LEARY:  You  can't  legalize  and  control 
manufacture  until  you've  worked  out  a 
constructive  way  of  licensing  or  authoriz- 
ing possession.  There  are  many  individ- 
uals who  should  be  provided  with  a 
legitimate  access  to  chemicals  that  ex- 
pand their  minds.  If  we  don't  do  this, 
we'll  have  a  free  market  or  a  black  mar- 
ket. During  Prohibition,  when  alcohol 
was  prohibited,  it  was  suppressed;  then 
you  had  bathtub  gin  and  bootleg  poisons 
of  all  sorts.  The  Government  received  no 
taxes  and  the  consumer  had  no  guaran- 
tee that  what  he  was  buying  was  safe 
and  effective.  But  if  marijuana  and  LSD 
were  put  under  some  form  of  licensing 
where  responsible,  serious-minded  people 
could  purchase  these  chemicals,  then 
the  manufacture  could  be  supervised 
and  the  sales  could  be  both  regulated 
and  taxed.  A  healthy  and  profitable  situ- 
ation would  result  for  all  involved. 
PLAYBOY:  How  would  a  person  demon- 
strate his  responsibility  and  serious- 
mindedness  in  applying  for  a  license? 
LEARY:  The  criteria  for  licensing  the  use 
of  mild  psychedelics  like  marijuana 
should  be  similar  to  those  for  the  auto- 
mobile license.  The  applicant  would 
demonstrate  his  seriousness  by  studying 
manuals,  passing  written  tests  and  get- 
ting a  doctor's  certificate  of  psychological 
and  physical  soundness.  The  licensing 
for  use  of  powerful  psychedelic  drugs 
like  LSD  should  be  along  the  lines  of 
the  airplane  pilot's  license:  intensive 
study  and  preparation,  plus  very  stringent 
testing  for  fitness  and  competence. 
PLAYBOY:  What  criteria  would  you  use  for 
determining  fitness  and  competence? 
LEARY:  No  one  has  the  right  to  tell  any- 
one else  what  he  should  or  should  not 
do  with  this  great  and  last  frontier  of 
freedom.  I  think  that  anyone  who  wants 
to  have  a  psychedelic  experience  and  is 
willing  to  prepare  for  it  and  to  examine 
his  own  hang-ups  and  neurotic  tenden- 
cies should  be  allowed  to  have  a  crack 
at  it. 

PLAYBOY:  Have  you  had  the  opportunity 
to  present  this  plan  to  the  Federal  Nar- 
cotics Bureau? 

LEARY:  I  would  be  most  happy  to,  but 
the  Narcotics  people  don't  want  any  sort 
of  objective,  equal-play  consideration  of 
these  issues.  When  anyone  suggests  the 
heretical  notion  that  LSD  be  made  avail- 
able to  young  people,  or  even  hints,  let 
us  say,  at  the  necessity  for  scientific 
evaluation  of  marijuana,  he  is  immedi- 
ately labeled  as  a  dangerous  fanatic  and 
is  likely  to  be  investigated.  This  certain- 
ly has  been  demonstrated  by  reactions 
of  people  asked  to  contribute  to  my 
legal  defense  fund.  There  are  hundreds 
who  have  contributed  but  who  realis- 
tically cannot  afford  to  have  their  names 


involved  in  such  a  case,  because  they 
believe  public  identity  may  lead  to  in- 
vestigatory persecution. 

playboy  is  among  the  rare  institutions 
that   will    tackle   an   issue   of   this   sort. 
There  is  an  enormous  amount  of  periph- 
eral harassment.  For  example,  I  couldn't 
get  bail  bond  after  my  indictment  in  La- 
redo, and  I  had  to  put  up  cash.  This  is- 
sue has  generated  so  much  hysteria  that 
the  normal  processes  of  democratic  de- 
bate are  consistently  violated.  When  sev- 
eral million  Americans  can't  have  their 
voices  heard  and  can't  get  objective  and 
scientific  consideration  of  their  position, 
I  think  that  the  Constitution  is  in  danger. 
PLAYBOY:  There  are  some  who  see  the  ap- 
peal of  your  conviction  in  Laredo  as  a 
step  leading  to  legalization  of  marijuana. 
Do  you  think  that's  possible? 
LEARY:  If  I  win  my  case  in  the  higher 
courts — and  my  lawyers  believe  I  will — 
this  will  have  wide  implications.  It  will 
suggest  that  future  arrests  for  marijuana 
must  be  judged  on  the  merits  of  the  in- 
dividual case  rather  than  a  blanket,  arbi- 
trary implementation  of  irrational  and 
excessive  regulation.  I  consider  the  mari- 
juana laws  to  be  unjust  laws.  My  30-year 
sentence  and  $30,000  fine  simply  pointed 
up  in  a  rather  public  way  the  severity 
and   harshness   of   the   current   statutes, 
which  are  clearly  in  violation  of  several 
amendments  to  the  Constitution. 
PLAYBOY:  Which  amendments? 
LEARY:    The    First    Amendment,    which 
guarantees  the  right  of  spiritual  explora- 
tion; and  the  Fifth  Amendment,  which 
guarantees  immunity  from  self-incrimina- 
tion. The  fact  that  I'm  being  imprisoned 
for  not  paying  a  tax  on  a  substance  that, 
if  I   had   applied   for   a   license,   would 
have  led  to  my  automatic  arrest,  is  clear- 
ly self-incrimination.  The  current  mari- 
juana  statutes  are  also   in   violation  of 
the   Eighth  Amendment,   which   forbids 
cruel  and  unusual  punishments;  and  of 
the  Ninth  Amendment,  which  guarantees 
certain  personal  liberties  not  specifically 
enumerated   in   the  other  amendments. 
PLAYBOY:  The  implications  of  your  arrest 
and    conviction    in    Laredo    were    still 
being  debated  when   the   police  raided 
your  establishment   here   in   Millbrook. 
We've  read  several  different  versions  of 
just  what  took  place  that  night.  Will  you 
give  us  a  step-by-step  account? 
LEARY:  Gladly.  On  Saturday,  April  16th, 
there  were  present  at  our  center  in  Mill- 
brook  29  adults  and  12  children.  Among 
them  were  three  Ph.  D.  psychologists,  one 
M.  D.    psychiatrist,    three   physicists,    five 
journalists    on    professional    assignments 
and    three   photographers.   At   one-thirty 
a.m.,  all  but  three  guests  had  retired.  I 
was  in  bed.  My  son  and  a  friend  of  his 
were  in  the  room  talking  to  me  about  a 
term  paper  that  my  son  was  writing.  We 
heard  a  noise  outside  in  the  hallway.  My 
son  opened   the  door,   slammed   it   and 
said,  "Wow,  Dad,  there's  about  fifty  cops 
out   there!"   I   jumped  out  of   bed   and 
was  in  the  middle  of  the  room  when  the 


door  burst  open  and  two  uniformed 
sheriffs  and  two  assistant  district  attor- 
neys marched  in  and  told  me  not  to 
move.  I  was  wearing  only  pajama  tops. 

One  of  the  sheriff's  statements  to  the 
press  was  that  the  raiding  party  discov- 
ered most  of  the  occupants  in  the  house 
in  a  state  of  semi-undress — which  sounds 
pretty  lurid  until  you  realize  that  almost 
everyone  in  the  house  was  in  bed  asleep 
at  the  time  of  the  raid.  After  the  initial 
shock  of  finding  armed  and  uniformed 
men  in  our  bedrooms,  all  of  my  guests 
reacted  with  patience,  humor  and  toler- 
ance to  five  hours  of  captivity.  The 
members  of  the  raiding  party,  on  the 
other  hand,  were  extremely  nervous.  It's 
obvious  that  they  had  in  mind  some 
James  Bond  fantasy  of  invading  the  Ori- 
ental headquarters  of  some  sexual 
smersh,  and  they  were  extremely  jumpy 
as  they  went  about  their  search  of  the 
entire  house.  One  interesting  aspect  of 
the  raid  was  that  all  of  the  women  pres- 
ent were  stripped  and  searched. 
PLAYBOY:  Did  anyone  object? 
LEARY:  We  objected  to  everything  that 
was  being  done,  including  the  fact  that 
we  could  not  have  a  lawyer  present. 
PLAYBOY:  What  did  the  police  find  during 
the  search? 

LEARY:  After  a  five-hour  search,  they  ar- 
rested four  people:  a  photographer  here 
on  a  professional  assignment,  and  a 
Hindu  holy  man  and  his  wife — all  of 
whom  they  alleged  had  marijuana  in 
their  possession — and  myself.  There  was 
no  claim  that  I  had  any  marijuana  in  my 
possession  or  control;  the  charge  involved 
my  being  the  director  of  the  house. 
PLAYBOY:  Did  they  have  a  warrant? 
LEARY:  They  had  a  warrant,  but  we  claim 
it  was  defective  and  illegal. 
PLAYBOY:  In  what  way? 
LEARY:  In  the  Bill  of  Rights  it  clearly 
states  that  the  Government  cannot  just 
swear  out  a  warrant  to  go  into  anyone's 
house  on  general  suspicion  and  specula- 
tion. Specifically,  a  search  warrant  can 
be  issued  only  on  the  basis  of  tangible 
evidence,  usually  from  an  informer,  that 
a  specific  amount  of  defined,  illegal  sub- 
stance is  present  at  a  certain  place  and 
time.  There  was  no  such  probable  cause 
for  the  raid  at  Millbrook.  Among  the 
"causes"  cited  was  that  cars  with  out-of- 
state  licenses  were  parked  in  my  drive- 
way, and  that  girls  under  the  age  of  16 
were  playing  around  the  yard  on  a  cer- 
tain day  when  it  was  under  surveillance. 
PLAYBOY:  How  would  that  be  a  cause? 
LEARY:  How,  indeed?  Another  alleged 
"cause"  for  the  raid  was  that  I  am  "a 
known  and  admitted  trafficker  in  drugs." 
Well,  none  of  these  espionage  reports 
seem  to  me— or  to  my  lawyers — to  justify 
the  issuance  of  a  no-knock,  nighttime 
warrant  that  authorized  the  breaking  of 
windows  and  doors  to  obtain  entry  to  a 
private  house. 

PLAYBOY:  What  is  the  current  status  of 
the  charges  against  you? 


LEARY:  We  are  now  involved  in  nine 
pieces  of  litigation  on  this  raid.  The 
American  Civil  Liberties  Union  has  en- 
tered the  case  with  a  supporting  brief, 
and  while  I  can't  comment  on  the  tech- 
nicalities of  the  litigation,  we  have  a 
large  group  of  bright  young  turned- 
on  civil  libertarian  lawyers  walking 
around  with  smiles  on  their  faces. 
PLAYBOY:  Do  you  mean  that  your  lawyers 
are  on  LSD? 

LEARY:  I  don't  feel  I  should  comment  on 
that.  Let  me  say,  however,  that  you  don't 
need  to  use  anything  to  be  turned  on,  in 
the  sense  that  you've  tuned  in  to  the 
world. 

PLAYBOY:  Dr.  Humphrey  Osmond  of  the 
New  Jersey  Neuropsychiatric  Institute — 
the  man  who  coined  the  word  "psyche- 
delic"— has  described  you  as  "Irish  and 
revolutionary,  and  to  a  good  degree  reck- 
less." He  was  suggesting  that  if  you  had 
been  more  careful,  you  might  not  have 
been  arrested  in  Laredo  or  Millbrook. 
LEARY:  I  plead  guilty  to  the  charges  of 
being  an  Irishman  and  a  revolutionary. 
But  I  don't  think  I'm  careless  about  any- 
thing that's  important. 
PLAYBOY:  Wasn't  it  careless  to  risk  the  loss 
of  your  freedom  by  carrying  a  half  ounce 
of  marijuana  into  Mexico? 
LEARY:  Well,  that's  like  saying:  Wouldn't 
it  be  careless  for  a  Christian  to  carry  the 
Bible  to  Russia?  I  just  can't  be  bothered 
with  paranoias  about  wire  tapping,  sur- 
veillance and  police  traps.  It's  been  well 
known  for  several  years  that  I'm  using 
psychedelic  drugs  in  my  own  home  and 
in  my  own  center  for  the  use  of  myself 
and  my  own  family.  So  at  any  time  the 
Government  wanted  to  make  an  issue  of 
this,  it  certainly  could.  But  I  can't  live 
my  life  in  secrecy  or  panic  paranoia.  I've 
never  bothered  to  take  a  lot  of  elemen- 
tary precautions,  for  example,  about  my 
phone  being  bugged  or  my  actions  being 
under  surveillance — both  of  which  the 
police  admit.  I  would  say  that  if  there 
was  carelessness  in  Laredo,  it  was  care- 
lessness on  the  part  of  the  Government 
officials  in  provoking  a  case  that  has  al- 
ready changed  public  attitudes  and  will 
inevitably  change  the  law  on  the  posses- 
sion and  use  of  marijuana  by  thoughtful 
adults  in  this  country.  The  Narcotics  Bu- 
reau is  in  trouble.  I'm  not. 
PLAYBOY:  But  suppose  all  appeals  fail  and 
you  do  go  to  prison.  What  will  happen 
to  your  children  and  to  your  work? 
LEARY:  My  children  will  continue  to  grow 
—externally  and  internally — and  they 
and  all  of  my  friends  and  colleagues  will 
continue  to  communicate  what  they've 
learned  to  a  world  that  certainly  needs 
such  lessons.  As  to  where  and  how  they 
will  live,  I  can't  predict. 
PLAYBOY:  Have  you  made  any  provision 
for  their  financial  support? 
LEARY:  At  the  present  time  I'm  $40,000 
in  debt  for  legal  expenses,  and  I  have 
made  no  provisions  for  eating  lunch  to- 
morrow.   But    we'll    cross    that    bridge 


when  we  come  to  it. 
PLAYBOY:  Do  you  dread  the  prospect  of 
imprisonment? 

LEARY:  Well,  I  belong  to  one  of  the  old- 
est trade  unions  in  human  civilization — 
the  alchemists  of  the  mind,  the  scholars 
of  consciousness.  The  threat  of  imprison- 
ment is  the  number-one  occupational 
hazard  of  my  profession.  Of  the  great 
men  of  the  past  whom  I  hold  up  as  mod- 
els, almost  every  one  of  them  has  been 
either  imprisoned  or  threatened  with  im- 
prisonment for  their  spiritual  beliefs: 
Gandhi,  Jesus,  Socrates,  Lao-tse.  I  have 
absolutely  no  fear  of  imprisonment. 
First  of  all,  I've  taken  LSD  over  40  times 
in  a  maximum-security  prison  as  part  of 
a  convict  rehabilitation  project  we  did 
in  Boston;  so  I  know  that  the  only  real 
prisons  are  internal.  Secondly,  a  man 
who  feels  no  guilt  about  his  behavior 
has  no  fear  of  imprisonment;  I  have  not 
one  shred  of  guilt  about  anything  I've 
done  in  the  last  six  years.  I've  made 
hundreds  of  mistakes,  but  I've  never 
once  violated  my  own  ethical  or  moral 
values.  I'm  the  freest  man  in  America 
today.  If  you're  free  in  mind  and  heart, 
you're  not  in  trouble.  I  think  that  the 
people  who  are  trying  to  put  other 
people  in  jail  and  to  control  basic  evolu- 
tionary energies  like  sex  and  psychedelic 
chemicals  are  in  trouble,  because  they're 
swimming  upstream  against  the  two- 
billion-year  tide  of  cellular  evolution. 
PLAYBOY:  What  would  you  say  is  the  most 
important  lesson  you've  learned  from 
your  personal  use  of  LSD? 
LEARY:  First  and  last,  the  understanding 
that  basic  to  the  life  impulse  is  the  ques- 
tion, "Should  we  go  on  with  life?"  This 
is  the  only  real  issue,  when  you  come 
down  to  it,  in  the  evolutionary  cosmic 
sense:  whether  to  make  it  with  a  mem- 
ber of  the  opposite  sex  and  keep  it  going 
— or  not  to.  At  the  deepest  level  of  con- 
sciousness, this  question  comes  up  over 
and  over  again.  I've  struggled  with  it  in 
scores  of  LSD  sessions.  How  did  we 
get  here  and  into  this  mess?  How  do  we 
get  out?  There  are  two  ways  out  of  the 
basic  philosophic  isolation  of  man:  You 
can  ball  your  way  out — by  having  chil- 
dren, which  is  immortality  of  a  sort.  Or 
you  can  step  off  the  wheel.  Buddhism, 
the  most  powerful  psychology  that  man 
has  ever  developed,  says  essentially  that. 
My  choice,  however,  is  to  keep  the  life 
game  going.  I'm.  Hindu,  not  Buddhist. 
Beyond  this  affirmation  of  my  own 
life,  I've  learned  to  confine  my  attention 
to  the  philosophic  questions  that  hit  on 
the  really  shrieking,  crucial  issues:  Who 
wrote  the  cosmic  script?  What  does  the 
DNA  code  expect  of  me?  Is  the  big 
genetic-code  show  live  or  on  tape?  Who 
is  the  sponsor?  Are  we  completely  trapped 
inside  our  nervous  systems,  or  can  we 
make  real  contact  with  anyone  else  out 
there?  I  intend  to  spend  the  rest  of  my 
life,  with  psychedelic  help,  searching  for 
the  answers  to  these  questions — and  en- 


couraging  others  to  do  the  same. 
PIAYBOY:  What  role  do  you  think  psyche- 
delics  will  play  in  the  everyday  life  of 
the  future? 

IEARY:  A  starring  role.  LSD  is  only  the 
first  of  many  new  chemicals  that  will 
exhilarate  learning,  expand  consciousness 
and  enhance  memory  in  years  to  come. 
These  chemicals  will  inevitably  revolu- 
tionize our  procedures  of  education, 
child  rearing  and  social  behavior.  With- 
in one  generation,  through  the  use  of 
these  chemical  keys  to  the  nervous  sys- 
tem as  regular  tools  of  learning,  you  will 
be  asking  your  children,  when  they  come 
home  from  school,  not  "What  book  are 
you  reading?"  but  "Which  molecules  are 
you  using  to  open  up  new  Libraries  of 
Congress  inside  your  nervous  system?"  I 
don't  know  if  there'll  ever  be  courses  in 
Marijuana  1A  and  IB,  as  a  prerequisite 
to  LSD  101,  but  there's  no  doubt  that 
chemicals  will  be  the  central  method  of 
education  in  the  future.  The  reason  for 
this,  of  course,  is  that  the  nervous  sys- 
tem, and  learning  and  memory  itself,  is  a 
chemical  process.  A  society  in  which 
a  large  percentage  of  the  population 
changes  consciousness  regularly  and  har- 
moniously with  psychedelic  drugs  will 
bring  about  a  very  different  way  of  life. 
PLAYBOY:  Will  there  be  a  day,  as  some 
science-fiction  writers  predict,  when 
people  will  be  taking  trips,  rather  than 
drinks,  at  psychedelic  cocktail  parties? 
LEARY:  It's  happening  already.  In  this 
country,  there  are  already  functions  at 
which  LSD  may  be  served.  I  was  at  a 
large  dance  recently  where  two  thirds  of 
the  guests  were  on  LSD.  And  during  a 
scholarly  LSD  conference  in  San  Francis- 
co a  few  months  ago,  I  went  along  with 
400  people  on  a  picnic  at  which  almost 
everyone  turned  on  with  LSD.  It  was 
very  serene:  They  were  like  a  herd  of 


deer  in  the  forest. 

In  years  to  come,  it  will  be  possible  to 
have  a  lunch-hour  psychedelic  session; 
in  a  limited  way,  that  can  be  done  now 
with  DMT,  which  has  a  very  fast  action, 
lasting  perhaps  a  half  hour.  It  may  be 
that  there  will  also  be  large  reservations, 
of  maybe  30  or  40  square  miles,  where 
people  will  go  to  have  LSD  sessions  in 
tranquil  privacy. 

PLAYBOY:  Will  the  psychedelic  experience 
become  universal?  Will  everyone  be 
turned  on? 

LEARY:  Well,  not  all  the  time.  There  will 
always  be  some  functions  that  require  a 
narrow  form  of  consciousness.  You  don't 
want  your  airplane  pilot  flying  higher 
than  the  plane  and  having  Buddhist  rev- 
elations in  the  cockpit.  Just  as  you  don't 
play  golf  on  Times  Square,  you  won't 
want  to  take  LSD  where  narrow,  symbol- 
manipulating  attention  is  required.  In 
a  sophisticated  way,  you'll  attune  the 
desired  level  of  consciousness  to  the  par- 
ticular surrounding  that  will  feed  and 
nourish  you. 

No  one  will  commit  his  life  to  any  sin- 
gle level  of  consciousness.  Sensible  use  of 
the  nervous  system  would  suggest  that  a 
quarter  of  our  time  will  be  spent  in  sym- 
bolic activities — producing  and  commu- 
nicating in  conventional,  tribal  ways. 
But  the  fully  conscious  life  schedule  will 
also  allow  considerable  time — perhaps  an 
hour  or  two  a  day — devoted  to  the  yoga  of 
the  senses,  to  the  enhancement  of  sensual 
ecstasies  through  marijuana  and  hashish; 
and  one  day  a  week  to  completely 
moving  outside  the  sensory  and  symbolic 
dimensions  into  the  transcendental  realms 
that  are  open  to  you  through  LSD.  This 
is  not  science-fiction  fantasy.  1  have  lived 
most  of  the  last  six  years — until  the  re- 
cent unpleasantness — doing  exactly  that: 
taking  LSD   once  a  week  and  smoking 


marijuana  once  a  day. 
PLAYBOY:  How  will  this  psychedelic  regi- 
men enrich  human  life? 
LEARY:  It  will  enable  each  person  to 
realize  that  he  is  not  a  game-playing 
robot  put  on  this  planet  to  be  given  a 
Social  Security  number  and  to  be  spun 
on  the  assembly  line  of  school,  col- 
lege, career,  insurance,  funeral,  goodbye. 
Through  LSD,  each  human  being  will 
be  taught  to  understand  that  the  entire 
history  of  evolution  is  recorded  inside  his 
body;  the  challenge  of  the  complete  hu- 
man life  will  be  for  each  person  to 
recapitulate  and  experientially  explore 
every  aspect  and  vicissitude  of  this  an- 
cient and  majestic  wilderness.  Each  per- 
son will  become  his  own  Buddha,  his 
own  Einstein,  his  own  Galileo.  Instead 
of  relying  on  canned,  static,  dead  knowl- 
edge passed  on  from  other  symbol  pro- 
ducers, he  will  be  using  his  span  of  80  or 
so  years  on  this  planet  to  live  out  every 
possibility  of  the  human,  prehuman  and 
even  subhuman  adventure.  As  more  re- 
spect and  time  are  diverted  to  these  ex- 
plorations, he  will  be  less  hung  up  on 
trivial,  external  pastimes.  And  this  may 
be  the  natural  solution  to  the  problem  of 
leisure.  When  all  of  the  heavy  work  and 
mental  drudgery  are  taken  over  by  ma- 
chines, what  are  we  going  to  do  with 
ourselves — build  even  bigger  machines? 
The  obvious  and  only  answer  to  this  pe- 
culiar dilemma  is  that  man  is  going  to 
have  to  explore  the  infinity  of  inner 
space,  to  discover  the  terror  and  adven- 
ture and  ecstasy  that  lie  within  us  all. 


'Reprinted  from  the  September  1966  issue  of  PLAYBOY  magazine; 
Copyright  ©  1966  by  HMH  Publishing  Co.,  Inc."